A Day Late

I spent so much time yesterday casting about for something to post, that I plumb forgot it was National Teacher Appreciation Day.

Here's a bit from Tim Wise (fast becoming my favorite social critic) from earlier this year. He's trying to throw some light on the facts of "education" here in USAmerica Inc these days.

My main takeaway is that we have to stop thinking the people in charge are stoopid and that they're making stoopid decisions.  The decisions are made and policies are put in place for specific reasons - and those policies are working almost exactly as intended.

And BTW - here's the Jefferson quote:

This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor [i.e., superintendent], who is annually to choose the boy of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools [high schools, in effect] of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of [Virginia], for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.

Tommy Jeff was cool enough, but I have no doubt he was a man of his times; an elitist with a bit of a conscience, but an elitist nonetheless.