What's the problem with government-run schools these days?

Easy.

They're not schools.

They're school-free drug zones.

Ritalin. Prozac. And all the rest of the mind-numbing, psychiatric drugs, handed out to children in the back of class rooms, at the same time that Officer Dare is in the front, preaching against (other) drugs.

Education? Actual learning, such as reading, writing, arithmetic? Nearly non-existent, as far as I can tell from talking to new college freshmen. These brand spoffing new college kids, fresh out of 12 year youth indoctrination camp sentences, can barely function as literate adults. Oh, they have plenty of potential, and many of them are sharp and alert -- although it makes me shudder how many are rather slow and dimwitted, not to mention nearly unintelligible when they speak, and can barely write an English sentence. These poor kids were not given the skills to prove their inherent intelligence to others via reading, comprehending, writing. In other words, they may not be stupid, but they sure speak and act as if they were.

What a colossal shame. The most active wing of the Communist Party, USA--the so-called "National Education Association" -- is hardly anything but an extraordinarily active lobby for teachers' rights. Teachers' rights -- not students. The NEA, at a recent convention, came out with a platform that supported abortion. What does abortion have to do with education, asked a very astute friend of mine. The NEA's platform also supported gay and lesbian rights -- again, what in the ever-more-bizarre world, does homosexuality have to do with education? (These ideas and information are hereby credited to Oral Deckard, editor of the Vigo-Examiner.)

Who knows? Perhaps the NEA will someday deign to clarify its groupthink for all of us.

Over the past few weeks, I begun to notice certain signs proclaiming "Drug Free School Zones" -- a rather absurd claim, considering the amount of drugs in schools whether of the legal, handed-out-by-school-shrinks variety, or of the illegal variety traded on the black market.

Not much schooling, many drugs.

And that, in essence, is the problem with government schools.

Kids are bored with the hypocrisy, with the pabulum they get spoonfed by idiot teachers, bored with the lack of any decent intellectual challenge, bored with the collective-think urged upon them all, bored with having a solid win or lose in sports denied them because it might affect the ego-esteem of the losers of that particular match. One can see why some kids might want to shoot hell out of these silly, ineffectual, stuffy, mindless places.

I was bored way back when too -- and that was in the days when real learning still took place to a significant degree. I thank God that I got out of school before the NEA got its money-grubbing hands on me, but even so, I was occasionally wearied by tired and dim pedagogy. Nevertheless, I think my generation was the last to experience what at least resembled a real education.

I can't quite understand the frightening violence of modern "school" life--but I can understand the angst and fury behind it.

When the droning bureaucratic teacher isn't capable of interesting the students in whatever is the politically-correct horsemalarky of the day, the students get risable. And then they're drugged.

School-free Drug Zones

Scary, ain't it?

©Patricia Neill 1999

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