There is an idea that is pervasive in American capitalism that entrepreneurs are the great producers, great men who move the Earth through intelligence, perseverance, and creativity. You can hear it echoed from Ayn Rand to Ted Nugent: the executives are the people who produce and keep the world moving, while the knuckle-draggers shuffling to work at 6 in the morning and don’t make enough money to pay taxes are, in fact, parasites.

This is bullshit.

The fact is, those corporations often didn’t get to their billions through wisdom or creativity, or even good luck. They got there through criminal activity, inherited wealth, and ruthless disregard for the value of anything but the stockholders and the corporation’s profit.

Case #1: duPont Chemicals

The duPont corporation is the perfect example of why these global companies think something like a whipping boy is a damn good idea. It’s because these are the same assholes who had whipping boys in feudal Europe. We have this silly idea in America that we are no longer controlled by the monarchs and scoundrels of medieval Europe, but is that really true?

It’s hard to believe that is true when I look at a family like duPont, who were Burgundian nobility who emigrated to the United States to escape the guillotine for their injustices to the lower class during the French Revolution.

If that’s not enough, they were one of the biggest companies accused by Smedley Butler of trying to overthrow the U.S. government to install a fascist dictator, as fascists tend to be more friendly to big, ruthless business. Now, you might not believe in Major General Smedley Butler’s accusations, but that doesn’t clear duPont of dirt. They’ve also been accused of having hemp made illegal to destroy the competition against their new product – Nylon – and they are also responsible for the lovely carcinogen probably in your kitchen right now: Teflon. They’re not even close to the worst.

Case #2: Chiquita

Chiquita weren’t always the non-controversial banana company with the wacky mascot that we all know now. At one time, they had a different name – the United Fruit Company – and a very different business ethos.

You see, rather than grow by producing affordable, delicious fruit… they bribed government officials in third-world countries, amassing enormous power over the politics of these developing nations and using it to exploit the workers in those places, to grow the cheapest fruit known to man (second to slave labor, I guess). Hence the banana republic.

Oh yeah, the guy the U.S. government supposedly sent in to make these banana republics more docile for the companies? None other than Major General Smedley Butler.

Case #3: Ford, GM, IBM and the Nazis

I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like helping the Nazis massacre millions doesn’t seem like a very American way to make billions, but that’s just what these companies have been accused of.  Yet Ford and GM have been accused of not bothering to close shop when fascists took power in Europe; hell, they took the opportunity to borrow some slave labor from the concentration camps.

IBM took it a step further, and actually provided the punch card system the Nazis used to keep track of all those slaves.

Conclusion

That’s not counting the German corporations you buy products from every day who provided such valuable technology as Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate the Jews. And the horrible and well-documented business practices of Wal-Mart and the Disney Corporation. Or the ruthless monopoly of Standard Oil, and the shady dealings of Microsoft… the list goes on.

These executives are not the benevolent and wise leaders portrayed by people like Rush Limbaugh or Ayn Rand. They are liars, cheats, and ruthless narcissists. Would you give your money to the Nazis? Then why give it to the people who enabled them?

As I watch the situation with AIG and Congress unfold, I can’t help but think about the nature of corporations, and what will happen to people like Edward Liddy – the CEO who authorized $4 million bonuses for the executives in charge of the insurance company despite the failure of the corporation. Is it really so surprising, though, to see business executives spending your tax dollars to benefit the majority shareholders of a company? We should expect corporations to keep their own interests in mind over that of their employees and the public at large in the country that spawned entities such as IBM – who made the punch cards the Nazis used to keep track of concentration camp prisoners – and the United Fruit Company – who took over the banana republics, controlling their governments to open their low-cost plantations – or even allegations, unproven though they may be, that corporations like duPont have actually tried to overthrow our government to install a business-friendly fascist.

Businesses exist to make a profit; CEOs of corporations are supposed to keep the interests of their shareholders in mind over just about anything else. Of course they will do what benefits those people who own the majority of a corporation. The problem is that we have set up and accepted, for far too long, a system, a relationship between government and business, that is fundamentally flawed – we have created the corporation as a whipping boy of the executives who run it, allowing them to act for profit regardless of law or morality.

The nobility of Europe often had a privilege for their children that was not at all extended to the common man: the whipping boy. The children of royalty could not be touched, upon penalty of death, and so their parents – terribly concerned with proper child rearing – created the whipping boy as a way to punish their children’s misbehavior without actually punishing their child. Instead, their kid would grow up with a good buddy – some commoner – who would take the beating for the noble child any time they acted improperly.

Now, this seems like a bizarre idea to those of us in America, who live without divine rights and nobility and class divisions (don’t we?). Unfortunately, it’s a concept that is still in practice, except it’s not the children of monarchs who benefit from it; instead, it is the board of executives of national corporations. The corporation actually exists, legally, as an individual, a person – they have the same property rights as you and me, they can sue or be sued, and, more importantly, they can be charged with crimes.

Unfortunately, charging an imaginary scapegoat with a crime doesn’t do too terribly much for the executives who are actually making the poor decisions and breaking the law. It is not the individuals making these decisions who face the consequences of their actions, but the corporate whipping boy – the imaginary ‘person’ the corporation represents. Well, you can’t send an imaginary person to jail. The most you can do is chastise them, and maybe issue a fine.

Thus, we have a corporate system where there are actually business executives sitting around a table with a cup of coffee, discussing whether it is more profitable to break the law and pay a fine, or to follow the rules and regulations passed by our government. Is there any wonder we have places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where oil refineries and chemical companies have polluted the water and air to the point that the cancer rate is astronomically high? If I stand to lose $4 million by implementing the proper safety procedures to keep those pollutants out of the water, and only $40,000 if I break the law, dump my chemicals in the river, and get busted by the EPA, of course I’m going to break the law!

Of course, it’s no wonder businesses have adopted an idea from the nobility we decided to throw the hell out of this country during the American Revolution, when you really consider where some of these wealthy corporations originated. For one thing, some of them are the same people who ruled Europe as monarchs. Next week, we’ll take a closer look at some of corporate America’s richest, and we’ll see how much we really have done to divorce ourselves from the same people who have been running the show since they called themselves barons.

So, I’ve got a secret for you this week. Don’t tell the Republican Party, but Bobby Jindal is a big douche. If you don’t know who Bobby Jindal is, he’s the governor of the shit-tastic state of Louisiana, and also apparently the future of the GOP.

The first-generation American from the deep south was chosen to offer to rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s address to Congress - often a speaking slot that signals the party has some interest in putting them up as a presidential contender, or, apparently as an alternative, a replacement for Mr. Rogers.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, delivering his rebuttal to President Obama’s address.

More telling still is that Gov. Jindal has visited seven other states in his quest to raise campaign funds – supposedly for a 2011 governor’s race in Louisiana, but you would think he’d have more luck winning a second term in his home state by not, say, being a dumbass.

A big bag of dicks. Completely unrelated.

What am I talking about? Oh, just that Jindal is a goddam lunatic, and here’s why…

1. It’s not a good idea to turn down unemployment money from the government when your industries are collapsing.

Bobby Jindal is among a handful of Republican governors debating refusing some or all of the stimulus money being sent out by the federal government. Specifically, Jindal does not want to accept the stimulus funds directed toward unemployment, saying it has a provision that would require Louisiana to raise taxes in the future to fund the expanded benefits.

Now, the fact that Louisiana pays some of the lowest taxes in the country aside… what the hell are you thinking, Jindal!? I could understand if Louisiana did not face a higher unemployment burden in the next year, but the mass layoffs happening around the state tell me that is not the case.

Alright, so you don’t like the stimulus plan, Jindal. Ideology aside, though, don’t you give a damn about your citizens? Apparently not, since you want to kill them, too.

2. Bobby Jindal wants to kill sex offenders.

That’s right. Bobby Jindal involved himself in a battle with the Supreme Court to keep a convicted child rapist on death row. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of child molestors, but expanding the list of crimes for which you can execute people is dangerous business, especially if you’re a nutjob conservative. The Supreme Court struck down that hope, so instead, Jindal pushed a bill to allow judges to sentence sex offenders to indefinite civil confinement - a slightly more reasonable sentence.

Oh, did I mention that he also signed a bill allowing for chemical castration? Alright, so the guy doesn’t give a shit about the unemployed, and he wants to kill or, barring that, castrate people. It can’t be much worse, right? But it is.

3. He can’t do math.

Seriously. At all. I mean, I haven’t looked at his school records or anything, but clearly Jindal doesn’t know dick about basic math, or he’d realize that cutting taxes while facing a budget shortfall is retarded, yet that seems to be his solution to the budgetary woes of the state.

Louisiana has a projected $1.3 billion budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year, so what does Jindal do? Propose extending tax breaks for the entertainment industry. Oh, but it’s okay, nevermind! He knows that will hurt the budget more, so he claims the lost $8 million will be made up by cuts in the budget (hint: education and healthcare, the two largest portions of the budget without protection under the state constitution). What do I expect, though? He’s the guy chosen to lead this bunch of lunatics, who also think cutting the source of state revenue is a good idea when the state has no goddam idea how to pay for the next year.

Conclusion

All that being said, I’d like to officially offer my support for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s presidential run on the Republican ticket in 2012. I mean, I’m not going to vote for him, but I’m telling you, Michael Steele, this is the guy your party wants. The GOP really need to get behind this guy. Really. The world doesn’t think you’re a bunch of dimwits enough already.

It’s no wonder I sometimes think that anyone with an (R) after their name is a blithering idiot. As usual, in my daily goal of picking a fight with at least one conservative, I was exposed to the stupidity of some conservatives’ views on government, when I was informed that the only roles of the U.S. government are to provide for the military, and to fund public education.

Anyone with the audacity to question this interpretation of The Constitution is quickly shut down; I was once informed that I only need to “READ IT, BROTHER” in order to understand. That’s an interesting interpretation of a document that – in my copy of The Federalist Papers, which includes the Constitution – is twenty pages of dense text. So it took the brightest thinkers of the 1700s twenty pages to tell us the government is only supposed to protect the nation from attack, and make sure people can read? Maybe they should have hired a technical writer to dumb it down a bit if that’s what they were trying to get across.

Unfortunately, this lunatic pseudo-anarchist view of government is not restricted to the inbred squirrel hunters of the South. A recent article by Andrew Kline on The American Spectator outlines this same idea – that our founding fathers believed in a government which barely functions beyond the most basic responsibilities:

When thinking of our federal government, the first question is and always has been whether that government has too much power — that is, whether it is too big. Yesterday, Obama tossed that question aside in favor of building a government that “works.” The Founding Fathers would be aghast. The people should be, too.

Well, no, Mr. Kline, you’re just a dumbass. The Founding Fathers wouldn’t be ‘aghast.’ Don’t believe me?

WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

How interesting to find the words welfare, domestic tranquility, and justice right there in the opening paragraph of our governing text. I suppose I will end on one final quote for someone from my past: “READ IT, BROTHER,” you jackass.

I recently had a discussion with a conservative acquaintance of mine about the nature of public assistance programs – him arguing that they are inherently evil, while I, of course, argued that they are absolutely necessary if a nation is to consider itself civilized. And of course, the issue that came up is what is always touted as the greatest trait of the American worker: their work ethic. The conservative response to hard times and low wages is to say a worker should take a second job, or work more hours, or bust ass enough to get a pay raise.

Well, big surprise, conservatives are once again full of shit. The American work ethic is the worst thing to ever happen to the health and wellness of children in our country. This idiotic idea that employers should be able to pay their employees basically whatever they want, and it’s an employee’s responsibility to either work enough hours at that job or take on another source of income just to feed their kids has got to die for us to solve any of the real social issues we face as a nation.

Isn’t it interesting that the Republican party – the same politicians who tout family values – are the same people spouting the notion that people should work harder? And this in the country where we already work more hours a day than the rest of the world! It’s hard to raise your children when you never see them. I am often told that problems with crime, problems in education, and problems with drug abuse all start in the home; maybe parents would have an easier time dealing with these problems their children face if they actually saw them once in a while – and I mean more than the hour of homework they might do with them before the kids have to go to bed.

But equally important is the question why should we work that much? You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who enjoys their job more than I do, but even I am more than ready to go home and see my loved ones when the clock hits 6 o’clock. There is currently 7.6 percent unemployment in our country. Hey, you know how maybe we could give those people jobs so they aren’t just collecting the government checks Republicans despise so much? If the people with jobs weren’t working so goddamn much!

According to a New Yorker study:

Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays). But there is a place that has got considerably closer to the leisure society of the futurists’ dreams—Western Europe. The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours. Compared with Europeans, a higher percentage of American adults work, they work more hours per week, and they work more weeks per year.

Alright, but they aren’t as productive as we are, right?

One obvious result of this is that America is richer than Europe.

See? We make more money! But…

In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure. Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.

You want to know what changed? Europeans realized that there is something more important than GDP. There is something more important than having the largest economy in the world, or the most powerful military. Your family and your life. Work should not be your life, and any society that thinks it’s all right for a person to put in 80 hours a week to feed their kids should seriously re-evaluate their priorities. I like my job, but I damn sure enjoy my weekend too. If you don’t, you’re as psychotic as Republicans.

That’s right, Tony the Tiger, you read that title right. Consider this your notice: I am officially cancelling my endorsement of all Kellogg’s products – not because of a picture your dick friends took, but because you’re an asshole.

In case you haven’t heard, Olympic swimmer and possible comic book mutant Michael Phelps recently lost his Kellogg’s endorsement and fired up a whole shit-storm of pointless controversy because of a picture taken at a college party showing Phelps hitting a bong like the lost third member in a Cheech and Chong trio. Hey, makes sense, right? Such a health-conscious company as Kellogg’s can’t be seen promoting some sickly stoner – that won’t sell Special K to healthy moms, will it?

Just look at these drugged out losers. Hey, the 60s are over, hippies!

Well, no, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. It’s completely retarded, in fact. Let’s not even get into the debatability of all the supposedly terrible effects of marijuana, or the fact that it’s probably not that terrible for you if Michael Phelps – the same guy who won eight fucking gold medals, folks! – likes to smoke it at parties.

You know what is really bad for you, though? Sugar. It’s pretty terrible for you when you eat it in the amounts we do in America, and can lead to all sorts of health problems: obesity, diabetes, heart problems, just to name a few. And hey, you know who one of the biggest dealers of sugar is? Ding ding ding, you guessed it! Diabetes is gr-r-reat!

You know what the second ingredient listed in Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes is? Sugar. The fourth ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. Mmm, sounds like a fine company to look down their nose on those gross, unhealthy, medal-winning potheads.

Speaking of syrup, here’s another wonderful Kellogg’s product:

The breakfast of champions: syrup and sugar-patties. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean waffles.

This is also the same company that produces a host of cookies, sugary snacks, and of course, the staple of every successful athlete’s diet: chocolate banana split Pop-Tarts.

Now, am I saying that marijuana is totally healthy? Of course not – you’re inhaling smoke. But considering obesity is one of the biggest killers in America, while marijuana trails behind at position… wait, marijuana isn’t even on the list? Well, shit. But, hey, lung cancer is on there! Maybe Kellogg’s is on to something after all.

You know what makes this whole situation even worse? Phelps has issued several public apologies for his “regrettable actions.” That’s bullshit, Phelps – you’re a goddamn Marvel mutant, why are you being a bitch? It’s none of Kellogg’s business whether an athlete they endorse smokes pot – once again, if it was that damn bad for you, he wouldn’t have won eight medals. Or is it the criminality that is an issue? If so, wait for him to be convicted of something (hint: he won’t be).

Phelps has nothing to apologize for. In fact, Mr. Phelps, I’ve got a suggestion for your next scandalous picture when you’re hanging out with all your stoner buddies. Why not get a nice close-up of you taking a dump on a box of those chocolate banana split Pop-Tarts? If you need a little help with that, I hear Special K is just loaded with fiber.

After a week or so of computer woes, I’m back, ready to take aim at the American education model once more. A couple of weeks ago, I observed a few fundamental flaws in the way we teach our kids. Here’s a few more crucial ways we make our kids, and our adults, stupid.

4. Not everyone is entitled to a college degree.

Part of the current incarnation of the economic stimulus plan passing through Congress includes tax credits for students attending a four-year university. This sounds like a great idea, right? Put more people through college, and we’ll have better-educated adults entering the work force.

The problem is, we don’t need more college-educated adults. We need more people with functional educations who can do actual, physical work – not more liberal arts majors who function in some service-based field. Take a look around your house. How many things weren’t made in China? How many of those things not produced by the Chinese were made in Mexico, or Korea? We don’t make a damn thing anymore. What’s worse, you can’t even find qualified carpenters or plumbers or mechanics in this country, because we just don’t produce citizens capable of these necessary jobs.

One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had some ideas on education that unfortunately Americans never bought into. Jefferson believed “every citizen needs an education proportional to the condition and the pursuits of his life,” and this couldn’t be farther from the typical American practice. Jefferson’s education model was based on the idea that any student was entitled to a free education… so long as that student continued to progress and excel. If you’re only book-smart enough to be a plumber, that’s okay, you’re just done with school in the 10th grade and spend a year or two apprenticing with a plumber. If you’re sharp enough to be some kind of paper-pushing clerical worker, maybe you get to go through the 12th grade, and on, and on, and on.

Unfortunately, we’ve become a nation too wussy to tell a kid he’s not achieving at one thing, maybe there’s another path; so instead we tell the child a lie, and he ends up wasting years of valuable time and daddy’s valuable money going to college and skating by on a D-average.

5. There are too many levels of bureacracy.

Bureacracies are some of the worst purveyors of bullshit. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a state university registrar’s office, has worked for a state office, or has had to get assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency knows this well. Education is a prime example.

First, you have the school administrators; then you have your local school board – eight or nine of (if the district where I live is any indication) the least educated individuals in town. Then you have whatever state board of education has authority. Then there’s the feds. This isn’t counting whatever idiotic committees exist on all those levels to ‘advise’ these authorities.

With that in mind, it’s no wonder there’s so much bullshit floating around in our educational models. Pretty much any time you see some state board sending schools lesson plans that get passed down to the 5th grade teacher, you’re witnessing bullshit in action. Anyone who has ever taught a class knows that every student is an individual, every class is different, and every lesson plan and pedagogy had better reflect that. You adapt your teaching to each class’s needs. Anything passed down from some board that has never even seen these students will not be effective for them.

6. We completely fail at teaching critical thought.

This is probably the biggest problem facing education. We no longer teach students to think critically, not just in their scholastic pursuits, but in everyday life. I asked a few college student friends how much training they had in critical thinking, and their reply really brought it home; almost every one of them said, “You mean like in English class?”

For whatever reason, critical thinking is something that we’ve associated with text. Sure, students learn how to analyze a poem, or read a book critically and write a response to it. But we don’t teach them how to apply that to daily life. English teachers rarely use items from world events, political rhetoric, or daily life to fuel students’ projects. Why not?

I’ve got an English degree. Certainly I value literature and its contributions to society. Yet I also realize that in the grand scheme of things, being able to read and understand Yeats is probably less important than being able to understand the logical flaws in something the president proposes. This is where we fail in critical thinking training, and it happens, as I’ve written before on this blog, because our school systems to not foster dialogue and dissent.

Our classrooms are designed like little dictatorships, with a teacher who is to remain unquestioned and obeyed. Controversy is stifled. School uniforms are a fine example. While there are many good reasons for implementing uniforms in public schools, one of the bad reasons people use to back up this action is the idea that we should stifle any potential conflict between students. Perhaps this is why they grow up to be passive adults, unable to communicate their disagreements or fight for their beliefs. Adults do tend to reflect the way in which they are raised, and our kids spend most of their day in school every week.

7. Problems start at home.

This issue is, along with critical thinking training, the biggest problem facing education. Unfortunately, it’s also the hardest problem to deal with. Most of the problems in education start at home. When teachers are playing catch-up with students whose parents did not read to them, give them any sense of discipline, or foster any love of learning, they are wasting precious time.

One issue here is that parents are simply too busy to raise their kids. With both parents working all day, how can we expect one caregiver to have the time to read to their kids at night? A family should be able to survive off one income. With fat-cat executives and families like the Kennedys debating whether they’ll take the Cesna or the Mazaratti to work, there’s no good reason why we can’t pay people who work full-time jobs enough to feed their families.

The other, of course, is one of productivity’s worst enemies: television, and all the other forms of entertainment we feed our nation’s children. We’ve all heard it before. The television is not a baby-sitter, nor is the Wii, but they are, unfortunately, used that way far too often. It doesn’t matter how many episodes of Reading Rainbow your kid watches, it’s not the same damn thing as reading a book with your parents.

Unfortunately, what do we do to solve this? Cross our fingers and hope the next generation of parents is more responsible, I suppose.

Conclusion

There are good teachers out there, and good schools. There are students achieving everywhere in America. But what about the rest of them? Those who are not blessed with some brilliant administrator with innovative ideas for running a school are often left behind to deal with old ideas, the pains of bureacracy, and students who just don’t seem to give a shit.

These are not all the problems in education by any stretch, though. These were those that came to mind with very little thought or research. What are some problems you see in education, and what are the solutions? And don’t just tell us on the War on Bullshit. If you’ve ever seen Idiocracy, you may have glimpsed the future of the United States of America, so for God’s sake, tell your local school board.

Related posts: Three Reasons Why Your Kids Might Be Stupid; The American Way: Three Absolutely Backasswards Practices

Ever notice how ninety percent of the people you meet on a daily basis are fucking morons? It’s kind of a no-brainer to assume most of society will be functionally retarded if your entire educational system is broken, designed to produce perfect citizens, instead of developing a love of learning and fostering intellectual growth in a youngster.

 America, you want your kids to stop growing up stupid? Here’s your solution:

1. Stop letting idiots teach your kids.

This one’s pretty friggin’ obvious, America. You can’t stick your kids in a classroom for eight hours a day with someone who spent eight hours a day in the same broken system and expect results. Now, the optimist might hope that those future educators pick up the knowledge they didn’t gain in high school during their stay in college, but unfortunately, young teachers are usually education majors in their larval stages.

Have you ever taken a look at the curriculum in most education departments? How about spending a little less time teaching people how to teach, and a little more time teaching them what the fuck they’re talking about. Call me crazy, but I suspect the English teacher who spent her four years in college writing big-ass papers and reading big-ass books will probably know a hell of a lot more about teaching kids to read and write than the English education major who took as many hours in courses like Educational Psychology as in actual English classes.

2. If your test is a Scantron, you didn’t learn anything.

I’m not against standards, or accountability, or any of the other buzz words educators use to defend federally mandated tests. I’m just against the whole idea of a multiple-choice, Scantron-type test. Yes, it makes for easy grading for a teacher. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t show that your students learned a damn thing.

The ability to memorize facts and formulas is only half of education. The other half is your ability to put all those pieces together and formulate actual ideas of your own. Otherwise, your ‘education’ is useless. Essays, short answer questions – hell, even oral exams – demonstrate a hell of a lot better whether or not a child has actually learned anything in school.

 Accountability tests are a good thing. Multiple choice tests are not. And speaking of accountability…

3. Teachers are students too.

And I don’t mean this in the hippie “a teacher always learns from his students” way. Yeah, no shit, a teacher always learns something from his students. More importantly, a teacher should still be learning from friggin’ books and classes.

If students have to take constant federally-mandated tests, then teachers damn sure should. Fields advance, conversations progress, and society evolves. Why should our teachers be a relic?

You ever wonder why your college professors were a hell of a lot more intelligent than the majority of your elementary and high school teachers? Well, more schoolin’ helps, but the other reason is because your college professors are supposed to continue educating themselves throughout their career. Most university teachers won’t acquire or maintain a job at a good school if they don’t continue to research, write, and advance their knowledge of the field. Why do we not expect the same out of teachers at lower levels? It’s bogus. Don’t just replace the old ass books in shitty schools, replace the old ass teachers, or expect them to keep up with the field.

Conclusion

Should we even have to explain this to our school boards, our education departments, and our government leaders? These solutions are common sense. Will this solve all the education woes of America? Of course not, but it’s a start. Next week, I’ve got a few more suggestions in the area of education: more dialogue, shorter school days, and the dreaded removal of sports from school.

Have you ever watched the news, read the paper, or sat through a high school class, and wondered why the hell people in America seem to do everything completely backasswards? I suppose it’s no surprise that we do things backwards in a country whose administration thinks an unprovoked invasion is a form of defense, but it never fails to amaze me how completely mismatched our system seems to be.

Here’s a few American practices and institutions that just don’t seem to make much damn sense when you really examine them:

1. Innocent Until Proven Guilty… on the Radio?

This is one of my personal favorites. We’ve all been told a thousand times that the greatest part of the American judicial system is that the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty – and, hey, I like this. It makes sense for a legal system to assume someone is innocent unless there is substantial evidence to the contrary.

What doesn’t make sense is that it’s alright to plaster the faces and names of individuals charged with a crime all over television, the newspaper, and any other media you prefer. What the hell is that? I’m presumed innocent, but CNN can tell the world that some jerk sheriff thinks I might be a child molester? Thanks, guys, that’s gonna endear me to the neighbors!

If a teacher is charged with a sex crime, do you think it will be easy for that educator to find a job teaching kids again, even if found innocent? Or a man charged with a murder that is later determined to be a suicide – will everyone shrug it off, or do you suspect there might be just a tiny shadow of doubt in the back of everyone’s mind?

Innocent until proven guilty is great, but then wait until someone is found guilty to tell everyone about their awful crimes. To do otherwise is, well, kind of a dick move.

2. We beat our kids, but ground our criminals.

Parenting is tough, and there are many schools of thought on how best to discipline a child, but one that has never made much sense to me is spanking. Now, I’m not talking about the one-two swat on a three-year-old’s behind right before they stick a fork in the socket; I’m talking about the middle-of-Wal-Mart-I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about-boy spankings that are part and parcel of daily life in the south.

Before I lose “y’all” spankers (that’s how they say it in the trailer park, right?), I’m not one of these hippies who thinks a kid can’t learn anything from a beating. Kids aren’t stupid, and they’re quick to realize that A+B=PAIN. There are just other ways of discipline that are just as effective – but more importantly to the topic at hand, it just doesn’t match up with what kids experience when they grow up.

Wouldn’t you think a more effective way of disciplining criminals would reflect, in some fashion, the discipline us adults remember from childhood? Those readers who were spanked will probably still shiver a little if they see Dad’s belt wrapped around a fist. Yet we don’t punish criminals with a belt. We punish them by grounding the shit out of them – for years. What’s wrong with this picture?

So we ground this guy…

…but beat this girl? WTF?

If I’m an immature kid, and mom catches me smoking marijuana, she uses physical violence to punish me; if I get caught doing the same thing as a damn adult, I just get grounded? What’s worse, if someone suggested beatings as a punishment for crime, there’d be inevitable comparisons to awful totalitarian regimes like China, where caning criminals is still a fun past-time (I guess it’s to occupy the folks whose kids have already grown up).

I don’t know what the solution is here. Should we cane our criminals, or ground our kids? Hm…

3. We use totalitarian education to teach future citizens of a democratic society.

Maybe this is the source of all the bullshit we post on here: the sad state of American education. Hey, it’s no secret that our schools suck and our kids don’t want to learn, right? But to be fair, would you want to learn if the fucking SS were teaching your class? Me either – that’s why I was homeschooled.

We’ve got a president who talks about spreading democracy to the world (and thankfully, we’ll have a different president hopefully talking about different goals by the time I update again), and while I realize that our American ‘democracy’ is a far cry from true democracy, it is at least founded in democratic principles. So why do we adopt such a fascist model for our schools?

Democracy and free society in general cannot function without an educated, critical citizenry who engage in free and open dialogue. Democracy without debate isn’t democracy at all – just look at the Bush White House, where dissent from Dubya’s plans is frequently silenced.

Yet we have an educational system that seems to be violently in opposition to dialogue. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher in an elementary school, or questioning information in your text books? Children are taught early on to accept whatever authority figures tell them is The Truth, and to always be mindful of anyone older, richer, and wiser than them.

Schools pass regulations to stop any conflict between students – because it’s too hard for unqualified educators to handle the conflict and let it be resolved in a civil fashion. Classes are set up with multiple choice exams where students memorize and repeat, instead of contextualizing and discovering information. Even the placement of the teacher in the classroom, standing before the whole class like Stalin before the proletariat, as a form of visual rhetoric, makes them seem like some distant and quasi-divine entity sent to the chalkboard to impart wisdom.

And now there’s the move in school districts across the country to go toward more uniforms and stronger dress codes.

Pictured: American schoolchildren, eagerly modeling their new Hitlerjugend uniforms.

Some people see children headed to school in their perfect uniforms and smile; I shiver. I shiver because those kids aren’t going to school to learn. They’re going to school to be indoctrinated. They’re going to school so our nation’s educators – blissfully unaware of how they are being used to subvert democracy – can teach them everything they need to know to ensure that a viable democracy will never exist in this country to take power away from those who already hold it. Next week, we’ll expand on this fatal flaw in education, and take a look at how an educator can be democratic rather than authoritarian.

As the world anxiously awaits the arrival of a new American president, welcome the ceaseless examinations of Dubya’s failed presidency: what will his legacy be? ask the reporters at CNN; I think historians will be kinder to him! cry the pundits at Fox; who the fuck is going to pay this douche to tour colleges and universities after he leaves office? ask the unbiased folks over at MSNBC.

Well, step aside, American media. Once again, you’ve been beaten to the punch by the Associated Press, who have figured out exactly what Bush’s legacy will be: Bushism. The AP this week published a list of their favorite Bushisms, and, while stumbling through Bush’s broken sentence structure and the words he seemingly pulls out of the black void of his ass, I couldn’t help but notice the accuracy of what he had to say.

Is it any wonder that Bush has created his own -ism? Some of these are such dead-on interpretations of reality, I forget the guy is president, not philosopher-general.

This week, there’s no bullshit. This is a tribute to a straight-talker, whose semi-retarded speeches reflect the wisdom of a real American hero. Here’s a few gems from the big list:

3. “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?”

Speaking at a campaign event during the 2000 election, Bush reflected on the current state of education. The irony of Bush’s poor understanding of verb conjugation really brings the point home for me.

With such a hard-hitting question on education during the campaign, you’d expect Bush to really crack down on education, right? Enter the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which, theoretically at least, rewards schools for high scores on standardized tests while holding accountable those schools which receive low scores.

Wow! Holding teachers accountable! You’re ballsy, Dubya, I gotta hand it to you. You’d think, with such a radical idea on education, Bush would probably make something like education his #1 priority during his term.

…but then you realize that he cut $4 billion from the Department of Education’s budget in 2006, while still funding an endless conflict in the Middle East with a bunch of people who didn’t even attack us. That might explain why they ‘is’ not learning after all…

2. There’s no doubt in my mind . . . that we will fail.

A passionate President Bush discussed getting the country back to work after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, offering this dreary look at the future. The stark, defeatist attitude is almost prophetic, looking back at it from the year 2009.

Now, slow down, you’re probably thinking. We’re doing fine in Iraq. Mission fuckin’ accomplished, remember? And I do. But up to 1 000 000 dead Iraqis and over 4000 dead U.S. soldiers beg to disagree. And what many people (Bush included) don’t remember is a place called Afghanistan – a mystical place full of hashish, opium, and strange creatures called the Taliban.

Now, with the man who actually attacked us either running free, or dead because his dialysis machine could not plug into a rock, Bush could not have been more accurate. We will fail, indeed.

1. There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.

Everyone’s favorite Bushism! Michael Moore made this one famous with his documentary Fahrenheit 911, and of all the prophecies listed by the Associated Press, this was the one I least expected to be true when 2009 rolled around. But lo and behold, Bush does it again.

Now, with Barack Obama shacking up in D.C., anxiously waiting for the day when functional literacy can again return to the White House, I realize this statement is probably truer than any words Bush has ever spoken. You can’t get fooled again is right, Mr. President. Just ask John McCain.