Back on Feb. 17 I offered another column on an American of great character and achievement -- in this case, George Washington -- who wound up better educated with only a few years of formal schooling than our high school "scholars" of today.
This drew a Feb. 19 letter from a reader who insists we now "live in a different time. ... We no longer live in either an agrarian or manufacturing-based economy. ...
"Our economy has evolved into a technology-based marketplace where competition requires an educated work force. Increasingly, employees must comprehend and use mathematics and science as well as have the ability to communicate effectively."
Hey! Now I get it. Men such as Washington, Franklin and Jefferson went to school for only a few years, yet somehow without benefit of instruction by any credentialed graduates of our fine modern teacher colleges managed to outmaneuver and defeat the greatest army and power in the world, build and run a new nation and lay out entire new cities with little more than their rudimentary mastery of geometry, trigonometry, French, Latin, philosophy, world history, and so forth.
Today, on the other hand, it takes 12 years to bring our high school scholars to a level of learning far beyond that achieved by those pathetic yokels of yesteryear, a point from which they're ready to open up bold new frontiers in biochemistry, electrical engineering and so on.
In recent days, several of those scholars -- on whose schooling the taxpayers have lavished $8,707 per year (construction included) for at least nine years -- have written in to respond to the wave of incidents in which Clark County schoolkids have lately been shooting each other on the way home from school.
The letters arrived via e-mail in groups of 20 or so, in waves lasting about half an hour, during late weekday mornings or early afternoons. Almost certainly, these young folk were urged to write their letters as part of a classroom project. They appear here precisely as received.
"The article I read in the Review Journal is called SECOND TEEN CHARGED IN FATAL SHOOTING, and the article has deeply demented me," writes our first young scholar.
"I personally think that the the young shooters of this crime should get jail time, but I don't think they should get any more than a couple of months to pay for the crime they committed. Im pretty positive that the teens in this crime understand what they did was wrong even if it was attentionally or an accident.
"I personally believe that they only reason the kids actually shot the weapon was to scare their peers, but ended up bieng fatal. My response to this article isnt because I believe that the young teens arent wrong for what they did, but no kid diserves to go through everything that Ezekiel Williams, and Gerald Q. Davison are going through. Their just kids, and I also believe that if the places were switched, and the boy who died was black, and the teens were white that their wouldn't be this much contraversy going on.
"I'm not a racist or anything like that but if that was the case than they probly wouldn't even be in a real jail right about now."
End of first letter.
"This letter is in respnse to the Leter Erine Mathews," begins our second lad, obviously stealing a few valuable minutes away from mastering physics, calculus and quantum theory, the better to work on his "ability to communicate effectively."
"I myself attend Palo Verde and am a freshman.At my attendnce here i have seen very little racism at this school. If the Situation was reversed i do not belive that there would be a much differnt outcome. I belive it was more gang related. From what i hear around the school is that his cousin Zeak is what made him do it. Zeak and the kid wereing througing up gang signs. Then later in the day the shooter was gonna be abducted into the gang that his cousin Ziek is in. So for him to be allowed they said he had to shoot this kid and if he didnt they would kill him. So he did as he was told. That is why i feel it has nothing to do with raceism but more gang related."
A third young technologist presumably takes time away from mastering the manufacture of gallium arsenide chips in chemistry lab to write: "I am a Palo Verde Freshmen and this shooting is really affecting us all in a lot of different ways. Expically the football team. ..."
One of the young ladies asks, "Where are the parents? In todays invorment kids don't have that special bond with their parents because all these students worry about is being with their friends going to get high and what pary they should hit up next. ... Parents obviosly are not watching who there child is hanging out with. ..."
Another young lady offers: "There has been even more shooting since the insadent. I really cannot believe that teenagers have not 'woken up' and realized that this is life. Ending a life over drama, etc. is absolutely rediculas. ..."
Although it's the spelling and punctuation that first leap off the page, it's also worth noting the striking lack of sophistication, development, and rebuttal here in both idea and argument.
Today's notion that 15-year-olds must of necessity be overgrown infants with ethical notions about as sophisticated as the nearest video game is a dangerous myth manufactured by the purposeful extension of infanthood through imposed intellectual entropy and isolation from the real world in the government schooling institution, the better to convince us these incompetent dweebs need three more years of being locked up and carefully herded around -- at $8,000 per year per butt in seat.
The current schooling institution is not preparing a quick-witted generation with the well-rounded education and critical thinking skills necessary to adapt quickly to a fast-changing 21st century -- as the letters above hint, though giving these kids a real test closed-book in history, literature or algebra would probably be even more sobering -- but rather for the kind of automaton-like behavior that was judged necessary for the subservient "worker class" in the 19th century.
Which is one very large reason so many of our science and medical grad students now come from overseas, why such a curiously large number of our successful entrepreneurs these days turn out to be escapees ("drop-outs") from the propaganda camps, why our currency and our economy are now collapsing before our eyes.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/.
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