One Response to “Summer brings further administrative changes here”

1. Terrence Doran on September 13th, 2008 2:39 pm

   (This in reply to an article written ealier this year by J. Chen.)

   “I’ve just returned from canvassing and registering voters and can firmly attest that the world-renowned ignorance and incompetence of our leaders is exceeded only by that of our electorate.” American citizen in Indiana, September 12, 2008

   As a former English teacher sharing the same fate as Connie Heermann, I submit three quotes from three brilliant minds that explain our experiences:

   “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein.

   All of American society is structured to make certain the mediocre–school boards, members of congress, ceo’s, and the like–rule. An original thought is like a live hand grenade to the mediocre minds.They lash out in fear through force and violence.
   The role of the school board is to foster obedience at all costs which they do through standardized tests and a military structure and produce a mindless population that tolerates if not applauds immoral invasions of tiny countries, the rich getting richer at the expense of everyone else, homelessness, foreclosures, the fouling of the air we breathe, obscene payments for anyone who distracts us from having to think–compare for example the salary of Peyton Manning with the salary of Connie Heermann-and the list goes on, and on, and on…

   And yet we keep electing these people over and over, the same people who are responsible for compulsory education.

   It’s worth noting Ms. Heermann was fired for acting on principle, which should be a virtue, but in this society it’s a punishable offense. She stood up for her students. In the world of the mediocre, standing up for principle is called “Insubordination,” the same word used to fire me. It’s no wonder then that the word used to describe our system of schooling is “compulsory” which is the exact opposite of what this nation brags about being–”free”.

   From an educational stand point, it does not work–half of high school students in our cities do not graduate, one of the highest illiteracy rates of any industrialized nation, low life expectancy, highest prison population in the world–but from the stand point of serving the needs of American empire, it works almost to perfection.

   American schools turn out a mindless, brainwashed citizenry that applauds policies against even their own self-interest. The worship of wealth, the contempt for the poor, the lusting after status, the electing time and again human beings who serve nothing but their own greedy interests, and nary a peep of protest from those being exploited. No wonder author Gore Vidal observed about America, “We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody is afraid to be thought in any way different from anyone else.”

   I’ll give Mark Twain the last word here:
   “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
   What are these idiots doing running our schools?

   Terrence Doran
   look up an account of my teaching days in Jack Getman’s book, “In the Company of Scholars”

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