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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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November 17, 2007 The Mayonnaise Cure Salvation Lies in Condiments by Fred Reed
I am going to revitalize the American mayonnaise industry. Yes. Such is the patriotism rampant in this column. We will fill the nation's swimming pools with the purest domestic variety, and then drown the entire staff of the public school system in it. I personally will tie cinderblocks to them. My love of country is great: I will use no Chinese mayonnaise. And then I'll bring back the one-room school house. Many will denounce me in the public prints as retrograde. Well, when you have driven your car into a swamp full of underfed alligators, retrograde is what you want to be. Why the one-room school house? Because it rewards initiative and brains and individualism and other things America no longer stands for and in fact can't stand. Think about it. In a school of one room, students can advance as they will. If a child of eight can read as well as the fifteen-year-olds, he can read with them. If he is able to do algebra when he is ten, why, he can do so. If he can't, he can stay with kids at his own level. If the teacher can't, put her in a tumbrel and take her to the mayonnaise. Is this not a splendid idea? No. Today, advancement in the public schools depends on race, creed, color, sex, and national origin, on time served, docility, pernicious pseudopsychology, tolerance of pointless make-work, on preference for form over substance. Learning anything is irrelevant. Indeed it is discouraged, as it might increase the self-esteem of the smart. What counts is absorbing group-think like a napkin in a beer spill. The important things are doing witless homework and pasting pictures in stupid projects. This is pure hell for the very bright, and tends strongly to favor girls, who are more likely to do things they know to be stupid. Next I am going to devastate the schools by giving the students hope. I will set up a comprehensive test, lasting perhaps a week, of everything that a graduate of a high school should learn. And I will tell the students that when they can pass that test, they can pick up their diplomas at the door. Gone, outa there. No more listening, agonized, to mouth-breathing IQ-85 preliterate marginal humans burbling ed-school Marxibabble. Can you conceive of the academic frenzy that hope of escape would inspire, at least in the bright? A fair few kids in the fifth grade read at a twelfth grade level. (And plenty of affirmative-action teachers, documentably and obviously, don't.) Lots could advance by broad jumps in all subjects if allowed to. Why not let them, and let them test out when they can? Isn't the purpose of school to get them to learn? Of course not. Schools exist to keep children off the streets and off the job market, to serve as day care, to provide submissive drones for the office market, and to instill appropriate values, meaning those that make for political passivity and high consumption. Americans exist to buy things. Now, again, I understand that any notion of rewarding competence runs against the national character. I am aware of the almost lascivious fascination with the dull, slow, inferior, substandard, puzzled, coarse, shiftless, lame, and useless. We have affirmative action to ensure the perpetuation of these ideals. However, as a titillating venture into intellectual pornography, let's consider how the schools look to the bright. Yes, yes, I know: the bright are elitist, and contribute nothing to civilization except all of it, and must be crushed. But…consider the bright anyway. Think of it as abnormal psychology, or peeking at dirty pictures. Ponder Bobby Lou, who carts around an IQ of 145 or 160. Understand that he is innocent of this mistake. He didn't mean anything by it. No intention of offending motivated him. Think of it as a genetic accident. But there he is: a freak, cursed by nature. Every day, for all of his young life, he goes to school and does what seem to him appallingly stupid things. They probably seem appallingly stupid to the other kids too, but they are worse for him. He listens to teachers with IQs so far below his that he couldn't reach them with a rope and a bucket. Globble-gurble. Blah blah blah. Wabble wabble. He squirms. He twitches. He thinks, "Why can't I read my physiology text that I found at Reiter's Scientific, or take Peggy Sue into the woods to cop a feel? God, I've seen bugs more intelligent than this woman, and more interesting. I've seen mothballs more…." Now, being average is not reprehensible, any more than being unable to bench press Oprah Winfrey. However, there is something to be said for matching capacity to opportunity. If you want to teach Bobby Lou, you get someone bright, and let Bobby advance as he chooses. If you want to elevate Oprah, you get a fork lift. But undeserved suffering is nonetheless inflicted on Bobby Lou. He rebels, or snores loudly, and the teachers think something is wrong with him. His grades are poor because he doesn't want to paste pretty pictures in notebooks full of foolishness. In high school he takes to petty delinquency and to drink, becomes morose, and maybe lapses into terrorism. If he does, it is justified. (Come to think of it, I would issue him a hand grenade at matriculation to encourage the teachers not to bore him. Ha.) In a one-room school, he could move at his own rate, and then test out of the whole fetid business. Better yet would be separate tests of different subjects. When a kid demonstrates that he can read at the twelfth grade level, no teacher should ever again be allowed to so much as mention reading to him, unless it be to ask him to coach her. If the kid passes what is now the tenth-grade Algebra II, or chemistry or physics, that should be it. He should then have a choice of taking advanced courses, taught by a vertebrate, or going behind the school to smoke and drink beer. I figure we can generalize the approach. We could have tests of what a student is expected to learn at a run-of-the-mill university (nothing), and at a middling or a first-rate university. (Surely someone remembers what they taught.\?) Really bright students could test out of the degradation in its entirety. The effect would be to unemploy a lot of professors, but we could just stuff them into the mayonnaise along with the rest. I know what you are thinking. What if we run out of mayonnaise? Improvise. Ketchup. Salad dressing.
Copyright 2007 by Fred Reed and reproduced here by permission of the author.
Fred Reed is a Marine combat veteran, police reporter, amateur biochemist, former long-haul hitchhiker, and part-time sociopath living in Mexico. Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. He has been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air&Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers. He is by all accounts as looney as a tune. Visit the "Fred on Everything" website to read his previous columns and sign up for his regular e-mail feature.
Because The Radical Academy publishes essays and articles on its website does not imply acceptance or approval of the comments or opinions expressed by the author of the material. Nor is the Academy responsible for any misrepresentation of the facts included. It is your job to be a critical reader.
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