What ‘Education’ Teaches

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My stance as a critic of public education began while I was in fifth grade at Lithia Springs (Ga.) Elementary School, but it was not until our eldest daughter spent a year in kindergarten that I realized that the system is inimical to liberty. Your local public schools are destroying America, and are ultimately a greater threat to our nation’s survival than ISIS.

The first lesson of school is, your parents are idiots.

See, this is why we need school: If parents were smart enough to teach their own children how to read and write, there would be no need for this massive government bureaucracy to provide education to our youth. Silly parents! How dare you think yourselves competent to educate your own child! Education is only possible when conducted by a government-trained expert and provided in a government-controlled classroom under the direction of government-certified bureaucrats.

The second lesson of school is, your parents are wrong.

This was not really a problem so much when I was in school four or five decades ago, when our parents and our teachers shared similar or identical religious, moral and political beliefs. Adult authority in that time and place spoke in a single voice that was patriotic, Christian and dedicated to basic values like hard work and honesty.

One might discern, in the values of my parents’ generation — raised in small towns or on farms, survivors of the Great Depression and victors of World War II — a sort of philosophical fusion between Stoicism and Calvinism. Children were expected to learn how to endure hard times and disappointment without complaint. Our parents despised the “spoiled” child who was weak, prone to self-pity and whining, because he had not been properly disciplined. Our teachers all came from similar backgrounds and shared these basic beliefs, and thus were not disposed to indulge misbehavior or to grade us leniently. Corporal punishment was the norm, and the unruly student did not dare question the authority of the teacher to administer such punishment.

The moral consensus of the American Century — a set of values shared by parents and school officials — has since evaporated, and has been replaced by multiculturalism and other “progressive” ideas, which are based on the assumption (ubiquitous in the modern education profession) that parents are all ignorant bigots, so that the duty of the school is to enlighten children with sophisticated beliefs.

Because parents are stupid (unqualified to teach their children anything) and wrong (deficient in sophisticated values), the school’s core purpose — the fundamental mission of the system — is to undermine parental authority and destroy the basis of respect between parent and child.

Once you understand this about modern education, a lot of phenomena that are otherwise inexplicable begin to make sense. For example, why is it that we have gone from a system where public education began with first grade to a system in which schools now have kindergarten and pre-K programs? Once upon a time — and not ancient history, but when I was in school — the government education bureaucracy didn’t begin “educating” children until they were 6 years old. Now, the government takes control of children at age 4, and yet there has been no discernible scholastic benefit from this expansion of bureaucratic authority. Second-graders today are certainly no more competent at spelling and arithmetic than were second-graders in 1966, despite the fact that today’s second-grader is typically in his fourth year of public education.

Gotta get ’em early, you see?

The process of undermining parental authority must begin as soon as children are potty-trained, for how else shall they learn the complete omnipotence of government, to which everything is owed and to which nothing can be denied? Your parents are incompetent idiots whose values are wrong — the sooner the child learns this, the better.

Schools nowadays are very bad at teaching facts, but very good at teaching attitudes, especially those attitudes the enable and empower the continual expansion of government power. An uncritical reverence toward certain intellectual abstractions — “Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!” — is drummed into the child’s head in lesson after lesson. One often encounters college-educated young people whose minds are full of hopeless confusion, so that when attempting to engage them in political discussion, we find they spew forth a mishmash of phrases cobbled together from the preamble to Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the poetry of Emma Lazarus, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Pledge of Allegiance and perhaps a few lines from various patriotic songs. To this jumbled mass of phrases, the young fool is ferociously devoted with what can only be described as a religious zealotry. A single four-word phrase from the preamble to the Constitution — “a more perfect Union” — seems to have been deliberately misrepesented to these young fools. No one has taught them that the Framers were merely describing their purpose to replace the imperfect Union (between the states) as governed by the wartime improvisation of the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they have been taught that this phrase is a sort of mystical commandment to future generations, who must continual strive to make a heaven-on-earth perfection of the government. Well, then, what sort of “perfection” do you suppose they had in mind?

“Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!”

When you are dealing with college-educated fools who seemingly cannot even comprehend plain English (e.g., “Congress shall make no law”) you frequently find that they have smuggled into the debate certain premises that they have never had any reason to examine objectively. A negative view of the past — a place full of slavery, greed, war, sexism and other oppressions — is so pervasive in modern education that the young fool can’t seem to understand why, in his enthusiasm for Democracy, he is embracing ideas that predate the birth of Christ by at least three centuries. Being devoted to this ancient idea with a nostalgic reverence, how then does he justify his enthusiasm for Progress? And how is it, we may ask the young fools, that despite all the Democracy and Progress of the past century, the United States is in some respects now farther from actual Equality than it was when Lyndon Johnson was president?

Our schools do not teach facts about history, political science and economics, but rather teach attitudes about these things. The attitudes they teach are the attitudes approved by the Board of Education, whose members owe their offices to contributions and endorsements from the teachers unions, which in turn are a key constituency of the Democrat Party. In most school districts, at least 75% of the teachers and administrators are Democrats, and in the colleges of education, quite nearly 100% of the professors are Democrats. Could anyone therefore be the least bit surprise that in 2012, Obama won 60% of voters under 30?

“Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!”

This rant was inspired by a couple of encounters on Twitter today, first with a conference of feminist educators sponsored by the Gender and Education Association:

Promoting feminist scholarship and practice in gender and education internationally, nationally and locally
Providing an influential feminist voice
Promoting and problematising knowledge on gender and education
Encouraging teaching, learning, research and publication on gender and education
Providing a source of expertise and knowledge for policy makers
Creating networks to facilitate the exchange of information between our members.

In other words, these radical ideologues seek to implement an agenda based on feminist gender theory — the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — in the grade-school classroom. You get the drift.

After I’d riffed on that a while, I got a phone call from my brother Kirby and, in the course of our conversation, he brought up the Atlanta public school cheating scandal, which put a number of professional “educators” in prison.

For years, I have advocated maximum feasible non-cooperation with the government education system. Get your kids out of public schools, always vote against any referendum for new taxes to fund the system, and never vote for any school board candidate who is endorsed by the teacher’s union. Furthermore, under no circumstance should any honest, intelligent person support the system by working for the system. Better to be working as a convenience store clerk than to assist this corrupt system as a teacher, librarian, or other employee.

The myth of the Good School and the Good Teacher are essential to public support of this system. If honest, intelligent people refuse to work in the system — so that the only people employed as public school teachers are as stupid and corrupt as the criminals who operate the Atlanta public schools —  then the system will collapse under the weight of its own failures. Larry Elder once pointed out an important fact:

One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44 percent of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools. In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41 and 39 percent of public school teachers, respectively, pay for a private school education for their children. In Rochester, New York, it’s 38 percent. In Baltimore it’s 35 percent, San Francisco is 34 percent and New York-Northeastern New Jersey is 33 percent.

Public school teachers recognize how wretched the system is, and yet continue to work in the system. Why? Because the public schools pay teachers enough that they can afford private school tuition, because teachers are paid more than the taxpayers who actually fund the school system that employs the teachers!

Anyway, after I went off on a Twitter tirade about the wretched taxpayer-funded catastrophe of public education, one of my followers criticized me for “painting with a rather broad brush.” Well, yes — I’m an extremist in this regard. I don’t want to hear any proposals to reform public schools. I want to hear proposals to abolish public schools.

Shut them down.

Fire all the employees, sell all the buildings, buses, books and other equipment at auction to the highest bidder. Use the proceeds of this asset liquidation to create a tax-exempt public trust that will subsidize low-income parents to send their children to the private school of their choice. Relieved of the burden of funding a government school system, counties and municipalities could enact drastic tax cuts that would unleash economic growth so that the middle classes could afford private education without any subsidy. All children would be privately educated because, once the abolition of public schools becomes a matter of policy, states will pass constitutional amendments forbidding governments from providing, regulating or otherwise interfering with education.

Damn the government school system — a foul and unholy thing! Consign it to the fiery pit of Hell, from whence it emerged!

Remember, I’ve been thinking about this since the fifth grade.

 

118 comments

  2. Every parent who has ever encountered a school administrator in this mode becomes familiar with this tactic: “You’re the only parent who has complained.” The fact that your cousin is a teacher, and is unaccustomed to being treated the way schools always treat parents, is both enlightening and extremely ironic.

    Here’s the thing: All teachers think of themselves as superior to all parents. The teacher is more or less required to believe that the parent knows nothing about curricula or pedagogy. After all, this is the teacher’s professional expertise, and it would destroy her sense of personal identity if she were to admit that an Ordinary Unqualified Civilian might know a thing or two about teaching children.

    This prejudice against parents (to call it by its right name) is so deeply ingrained into the culture of education that few even recognize it, much less understand why it exists and how it operates. It is seldom challenged because the majority of parents are either (a) less educated than the average teacher, or (b) oblivious to what is going on in the classroom, or (c) both.

    It is only the well-educated and keenly observant parent who has a disposition to apply critical scrutiny to his child’s school. When such parents try to talk to a teacher or principal about a problem — and this happened to us at least twice during the year our oldest was in public school kindergarten — they are horrified to encounter The Great Wall of Bureaucratic Denial. It is impossible for the people who run the school to admit that there is a problem with the school, you see. No — “You’re the only parent who has complained,” and you immediately recognize this as a tactic, something that they are taught in their How to Be a School Principal seminars. You are being gaslighted, and the principal is attempting to throw you onto the psychological defensive, to make you feel like you are a Bad Person for doubting the school’s competence to do its job.

    The Ordinary Civilian Parent, who is accustomed to being treated with respect as a competent person in his daily life, is shocked at being snubbed as an inferior in such an encounter. And to add insult to injury, the parent sees that the principal thinks he can run this little psychological game — as if I don’t recognize it when somebody’s playing me for a chump?

    Fuck you, Mister Public School Bureaucrat.

    Fuck you, and fuck your system, too.

  3. Common Core is NOT OK, by any measure! Review the history. It has been a left wing, big government monster since the beginning, whether you trace it back to LBJ or even earlier to the progressives. http://www.restoreokpubliceducation.com/

    I get sick every time I hear some politician talk about restoring trust in government. Never! Restore accountability. The citizens “trusting” government is what got us where we are today!

  4. It was just funny in the ironic way since she used to say that public education was the corner stone of how the American system has succeeded. All the other platitudes and defensive mechanisms that a public service union employee gave out, when challenged on the assumptions of the system. I am younger to her by about a decade. It’s was eye opening to her when she a member of the clique got treated the way she did. It was even more eye opening when she applied to a local private parochial school and found that it wasn’t the hive of evil and stupid that she was lead to believe by her overpaid union leadership. The worst thing for her was the threats to her job by abiding by the law of the land. Then when trying to fight for her job her union gave her the cold shoulder as if she broke the long red school house line of trust. That was what really turned her away from the whole shennigans that is the public education system and as she looked at it she realized it was corrupt from the kindergarten years till one graduates with a degree in college.

  6. “Such a prescription abandons the system completely to the wolves at the gate.”

    Exactly, and deliberately so. I am as radical as Lenin in this regard. The “worse is better” approach — a desire to accelerate the crisis, to expose the irreconcilable contradictions of the system — requires a radical to accept the fact that change can never be painless, and that the continuation of the status quo is causing so much harm that the sooner the system can be completely destroyed, the less human suffering there will be in the long term.

    My idea of maximum feasible non-cooperation acknowledges that, for many people, non-cooperation is difficult. Your financial circumstances force you to send your kid to the public school, or you have pursued a career as a public school teacher and would suffer serious financial harm if you left the system. OK, I get that. But within those limits, what can you do? Well, a parent or a teacher could document and publicize the bad curricula, harmful pedagogy and general incompetence of the system. You may be able to do this anonymously. You may be able to develop a confidential arrangement with your local newspaper reporter so that you — as the parent or teacher — can ensure that problems within the system do not escape public notice.

    As it is (remember I spent years as a journalist in small-town Georgia covering the schools, first as a sports editor and then as an education editor), public school teachers seem to have a code of omerta, where problems within the system are keep secret from outsiders. You don’t want the parents to get the idea that the school system that pays your salary is irreparably broken. And parents don’t want to admit that they are sending their children to schools that are dangerous or substandard.

    TELL THE TRUTH! If more parents and teachers were willing to TELL THE TRUTH about how awful these schools really are, it would provoke public outrage.

    Because I was the kind of reporter who knew the importance of building relationships of trust with my sources — please, tell me the whole story, even if it’s a secret that I can never tell — I was privy to knowledge about what goes on inside schools that most people never know about. This was in the ’80s and ’90s, and if it was that bad 20 or 30 years ago, how bad is it now? It is undoubtedly much worse in many ways, and yet the P.R. mentality keeps people quiet about the harmful things that happen inside schools.

    When I occasionally blog about teachers being arrested for sex with their students, I am keenly aware that it’s the tip of an iceberg. Not just teacher/student sex, but all kinds of other pervasive problems inside the education system that in most cases never comes to public attention because of the omerta code.

  7. A fairly quick way of eliminating the system is to issue to each school a corporate charter as a philanthropy. The trustees would be elected by postal ballot by locally resident alumni. Drawing up a list of the electorate eligible to vote would be a challenge, but not an insuperable one if supervised by officials acting in good faith. The regulatory architecture governing the philanthropy would be of the standard type governing non-profits with some curlicues: limits on the compensation of officers, but, given that a school is an expressive association, a very stripped down version of labor law which includes some inhibitions on nepotism and eliminates employment discrimination law entirely.

    As for the state education department, you retain the psychometricians, transfer the auditors to the state comptroller’s office or the tax collector, and fire the rest. The same deal would apply to the local superintendant’s office.

  10. When I was in first grade (a good 50 years ago), the teacher said to us, “You’re the smartest, best educated generation in history” — as she wheeled in the movie projector for yet another day od “education”.

    I rolled my eyes and knew we were bing conned, even if, being a typical kid, I didn’t mind another session of video “education” rather than real education.

  11. “Notice please that the shift in public education from education to indoctrination begins with Carter and the Department of Education, which signaled the era of ever-increasing federal control. That was 1977.”

    ?

    I assure you, when I was in school (I graduated h.s. in ’75), I had already been through more than a decade of leftist indoctrination. It goes back to John Dewey and the other socialists/progressives.

  12. Our wonderful host wrote:

    public school teachers seem to have a code of omerta, where problems within the system are keep secret from outsiders.

    I’m sure that’s true, because omerta appears to be practiced in almost every profession, almost every workplace. I’ve seen it everywhere I have worked, where good employees cover up for bad ones, even bad ones who steal from the company, because the bad ones are still their friends. (This is why the offending priests got away with it for so long; the priests were all other priests’ friends, and nobody wanted to turn in his friend!)

  13. Our thoroughly frustrated host wrote:

    TELL THE TRUTH! If more parents and teachers were willing to TELL THE
    TRUTH about how awful these schools really are, it would provoke public
    outrage.

    That can never be done if the honest people shun the system. The real answer is that honorable people need to flood the system, need to get on school boards (first) and then into administration and on down.

    And there is a second answer: public school salaries need to come down, not go up. School teachers should be paid roughly the median wage for their district, and poorer people should never see their taxes cranked up so they can pay people making more money than them even more.

    This has been my complaint about public sector unions. In the private sector, unions, in the end, have to be partners with the companies; their demands cannot be so high that it forces the company out of business, or the union jobs’ wages drop to zero.

    But in the public sector, the customer cannot choose not to buy; his taxes are compelled by the police power of the state. This is why the power of public sector unions must be broken, and the first way to do that is to get on school boards and say to the unions, this is what you’ll be paid, and if you won’t take that, we’ll find other people who will.

  15. In my childhood back yard, from the block of wood to the stone, from there to the elm sapling, from there to the high tuft of field grass, etc.

    What means this “feet” thing?

  16. One needn’t be a believer to realize that the Christian Bible, especially King James version, should be part of the education offered to every intelligent child, just as Shakespeare and Jack Vance should be.

    (I really like Jack Vance, okay?)

  18. The comment about how parents are stupid and unqualified? Too true. Couple of stories: my pops was a public high school teacher in Washington state for 38 years. He, of course, hated the teacher’s union from day one, but he had no choice. He’s often talked about how he saw the culture of education changing more and more radically every year (though parenting attitudes changed as well from raising children to letting the schools raise them). His last year he had a pre school-year teaching conference, as they did every year, and one young teacher, only a couple of years out of teaching school, was complaining about how parents just didn’t know what they were doing and how “we” (i.e., the teachers/schools) needed to have contact with the kids at an even earlier age. My pops, who really wasn’t paying attention that much until that comment, spoke up and said “sure. Why not have contact from the day they’re born?” The young teacher replied “exactly!” To which my father said “yeah, that worked out well in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, North Korea . . . ” The young teacher responded that she didn’t understand his point, at which time my father thought it best to merely stop and let her stupidity stand.

    The other story is my own: I have been a special education attorney for 13 years now, representing students who get denied services they’re entitled to under Federal and state law. I’ve noticed a shocking rise in this very same attitude – parents are simply baby producers, WE raise the children and so parents should just shut up – in that time. The arrogance, the entitlement, the self-inflated sense of importance of the education community is shocking.

    Oh, and by the bye, do you know who these liberal educators screw over first in illegally denying services for special needs children? Minorities, ESL, single parents, and the poor. So much for the liberal concern for said groups.

  19. I disagree. If you look at some documentation regarding the Archdiocese of Boston’s most promiscuous offender (Fr. John Geoghan), very few clergymen were, prior to 1980, aware of what he was up to and maybe one may have been sure of it rather than suspecting it. It was only around 1980 that the Boston chancery concluded, from the small portfolio of complaints it had, that Geoghan was a pedophile. There was one important complaint which is known to have been made ca. 1967 and either not transmitted to the chancery or lost by the chancery. Even during the period running from 1980 to 1992 when the chancery shuffled Geoghan between parish assignments and time in a psychiatric funk-hole, the number of clergy outside the chancery who knew about his transgressions was likely in the single digits or low double-digits – the four pastors he had and likely some curates at the same parishes. After 2001, scores of people (130 or more covering the period running from 1964 to 1991) filed retrospective complaints about this man. For the vast majority of accused priests, there were one or two complaints.

    The problem you had with priests (prior to 1980) was that people did not report them. The problem you had after 1980 was that the reports were often made more than a decade after the fact and difficult to verify if the priest did not fess up (and a great many did fess up). The problem you had from about 1980 to 1993 or thereabouts was that the modal policy when confronted with a believable accusation was treat and transfer. This lead to much humiliation later on, though most dioceses had only a couple of serious recidivists.

  20. Well, he told me at some previous point that he liked this little girl Julia, which brought Juliet to mind, so I quoted the only part of Romeo’s soliloquy I could recall. When they were little, I made them memorize things, just as memory-strengthening exercises. So that piece was something he ended up memorizing when I drilled him on it. It’s not like I was teaching them Shakespeare at that age. He also memorized Psalm 23 and the opening lines of Jabberwocky, for instance, because those were things I had memorized.

    But this was the same kid, when sent to pick up the toys in his room, would later claim that he “forgot”.

    The damn “skool” didn’t even recognize Shakespeare, though. I guess it wasn’t featured on any standardized tests.

  21. Just had lunch and shared a table with a contingent of public education’s best and brightest (model UN delegates). If the primary goal of modern education is to destroy any sense of curiosity in our youth, then they have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Lacking curiosity and facts, they have filled the massive gaps in their understanding of the world with wild imaginings that are not afar off from the ravings of a lunatic… And there they were, heads full of nonsense and fluff but ready and eager to solve all of the world’s problems…

  22. Yeah, but it didn’t seem worth it to argue that point, though I was tempted. If I wanted to argue about all the asinine things they did, said or taught, I would have basically been down there all day, every day. That’s why I was saying it was less time consuming for me to homeschool. Which is pretty bad, when you think about it.

  23. One of the most revealing events for me in regards to public education was during the advent of the internet. Suddenly, everyone had to write – an act that precious few had done since leaving school – and they were proving that they had learned nothing.

    Phrases like “should of” began popping up everywhere. When I started seeing things like that I said, “Oh, my God! Is that what you think you’ve been saying all this time?”

    The epithet “Grammar Nazi” was created to deal with people who found “should of” and other such nonsensical things laughable. (Which strikes me as odd. Someone’s damning your race, culture, or religious beliefs on the internet… and they can’t bear to have their bad grammar called into question?)

    What did the school system do when it became blindingly obvious that no one had learned to write?

    Did they scream, “Oh, no! We need to redouble our efforts in writing! We need to focus on this!”

    Nope. They didn’t give a damn! They just kept putting condoms on bananas and telling kids that anal sex is totally safe.

  24. I hear you. The thing is, other than some fragments of West Virginia, Mississippi, the Rio Grande Valley and some Indian reservations, eastern Kentucky is about the most impecunious part of the country. It’s also very rural. Less than 20% of the population lives in a dense settlement with even 2,000 people in it; about 4% live in a finger extending from Huntington, WVa and that’s the only metro population at all.

  25. Remember the SRA cards? Did you have those in your school? I had a reading class that used that junk, and I finished every card and writing assignment in the box the first week.

    The teacher didn’t know what to do with me, so I asked if I could just go to the library every day and read books, then write reports on them, which they let me do. And I seriously doubt that she ever actually read any of my reports, either, but whatever. It worked for me.

  26. Pardon, but I think the best incentive that any business has is when customers walk away. Then the business HAS to fix it fast or close it’s doors.

    Public schools are insulated from that and always will be.

    Just as any government institution is.

  27. But it isn’t common. I found that most of my contemporaries had not had K-garten. From my own experience, it doesn’t add much if anything.

  29. I remember the SRA reading lab. My father made me go to summer school one year to punish me for some reason or other (USAF Master Sergeants can be narrow minded sometimes), and they used that stuff. This was ca ’68 in Dependent Schools in Germany. They gave me a different level each week and I finished in minimum time. I was in the 8th grade at the time and reading at a 12th grade level. They simply had nothing else for me to do.

  31. Not only are they impecunious, but they’re dirt poor as well!

    Kentucky went to mostly state funding of public education decades ago, after a state Supreme Court ruling required equality of funding throughout the Commonwealth. As a result, the pubic school systems in eastern Kentucky are the most reliable forms of employment, and jobs with the school system are coveted.

  32. You have conflated customers walking away from a private business — which means: the business loses revenue, and goes broke — with customers walking away from a government institution, which still has the power to take your money in the form of taxes. The “paying customers” can’t walk away from the public schools.

    You send your kids to parochial school, and you pay parochial school tuition, but you still pay your taxes to support the public schools.

  34. *grin*

    It’s no secret that I think public schools are wrong in large because they are government institutions. The American public school movement started in part to suppress Catholic schools.

    I believe in competition. Without government money (or even government vouchers) distorting the system, I think most of the problems would disappear.

    Since I don’t have kids, I resent paying taxes to support education. Even if it’s a “small” amount.

    Extortion is extortion. Even if it’s called taxes.

  35. Oh, and while I think parochial and other faith based schools are good, I think they’d be better still with private for-profit competition.

    Something else the politicos and technocrats don’t like.

  36. Yeah, but in my position as Junior Lawyer, I was always able negotiate an alternative situation. Once I negotiated permission to work as an assistant in the Educable Mentally Retarded class at the elementary school down the street, and journal my experiences. So long as I offered up something that sounded reasonably “educational”, they let me do it. Better than me sitting bored in class and causing trouble, which they well knew was the alternative. (My Spanish teacher would angrily confirm that, lol. I’ll bet she still remembers me to this day.)

    Of course, they’d never let me do that today, unless I volunteered to do community organizing in support of LGBT or abortion rights, or maybe voting “rights” for illegals.

  37. That’s sort of non-sequitur. What does Penn State have to do with how common it was in Catholic rectories to know of some other priests sexual misconduct?

    (It fails even as analogy. The actual colleagues of Sandusky were Messrs. Paterno and McQueary, not the departmental hourly staff (some of whom also had seen things), and Paterno and McQueary reported what they knew to their superiors. It was their superiors who dropped the ball after that).

  38. Nah, most schools, should let a high achieving HS student help with elementary Special Ed kids.

    Pitch it as “Ensuring that we get as many graduates as possible into the best universities.”

  39. Ooohhhh yeeeaah… I remember SRA Thinklab.

    As half-breed trailer-trash and a runt, I used to get beat up constantly. The ONLY good memories I have from grammar school involve GATE, self-directed learning and Thinklab.

    You pick a card out of the box. No time limit. If you solve it by yourself, with no help, you get a red mark. If you need help to solve the problem, you get a blue mark. If you can’t solve it at all, you get a black mark.

    I remember the first SRA Thinklab brain teaser I solved at age 5:

    Two russians get off of a bus. One russian is the father of the other russian’s son.

    Q: Who is the other russian?

    (Cut me some slack, I was five)

  40. There was the band director that I had the second half of eight grade. Apparently some of the girls thought him most desireable. I just played trumpet.

  41. Hammers, sledge hammers, 4′ crowbars, and common explosives are all good tools when dealing our education system.

  43. Kinda in the same vein…
    The winter of ’66-’67 my father brought us an American sled. We wanted a German sled, but he didn’t listen to us. It was actually the better purchase. We lived in Dansenberg and near Kasierslautern and the place was growing and road in front of the house was dirt (no gravel, real dirt) and after the snow got packed it was slickern’ you know what on a glass door knob. As the week wore on we had a track of nearly a kilometer and it Faaaaaaassssstttt! All the Kraut kids wanted on with us and we were small enough that we could get 6 of us on the giant Flexible Flyer and we had a high old time.

    We spoke broken German, and they spoke broken English, but we all spoke the one language in common, that boys worldwide speak fluently – trouble. The boys loved the sled and trail we broke, but German mothers had a much different and quite coarse word for us Amerikaner junge – verdammt!

    We all laughed and used that trail daily until the snow was gone. We moved south to near Stuttgart that following August so we didn’t get to repeat the adventure. I’m sure the mothers of Dansenberg breathed much easier.

  44. Who is the other russian?

    A hero of the working class fighting for the good of motherland against bourgeois capitalist Zionist aggression ?

  45. #being back our gir……#black lives matt…..#take it down no….
    #what are we up in arms about this week?

  46. I’m past 50 and remember getting my behind paddled for given teachers any sas- this through the twelfth grade.

  48. Reminds me of a story. I had just been suspended from school for three days. My Mom got a call at work telling her I had been suspended.

    She came home, grabbed me and drove me back to school, marched me into the Principle’s office and told him in no uncertain terms that suspension was what I wanted and he shouldn’t give it to me. Instead, he should paddle my ass and I would straighten up.

    This was in the mid sixties in SoCal when California was still considered a conservative state.

  50. BWAHAHAHAHA!

    May I offer up these alternatives: A member of the current Administration. A former member of the Weather Underground. A Salon editor or MSNBC producer.

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