“The teacher don’t know about how to deal with the student body
And the underclassmen are flashing hot and cool
All your girlfriends care about the watch you wear and talkin’ about it
Believe it or not there’s life after high school.” — Darryl Hall
Yesterday we talked about term limits and the fate of certain legislation. At least I was doing the proverbial talking. For some reason my mind went to the stories we are hearing from Florida and Arizona. Obviously, there is a connection there that some people cannot see.
The connection is pretty direct in my mind. The pundits even have an official term for morons that vote. They call them “low information voters“. It’s quite the euphemism. Of course, a not inconsiderable amount of Americans will not know what a euphemism is. So, let’s just say a growing number of voters are idiots.
A Facebook friend released a meme (the lowest common denominator) which said we should give veterans the care they need before anyone gets a sex change operation. The problem is two-fold. One is an elective procedure that is covered by private insurance or paid for out of pocket. The other we would hope would be covered by the government. Put together they are non-sensical. One has nothing to do with the other. You might as well say that I can’t get my cavity filled until every soldier has their necessary care taken care of.
Strong public education does two things. First and foremost, we arm students with critical thinking skills. So, hopefully when one sees such a thing they stop and ask how those things are related instead of just grunting and saying, “damn straight!” Secondly, you’d hope they would learn enough about how government works to know when someone is full of crap.
We would not water down the requirements for being a medical doctor. We wouldn’t do that for engineers. We wouldn’t do that for pilots, lawyers, or dentists. Why we would do it in education? Sadly, it is either because they don’t care about the quality of teachers or they actively are trying to tank the quality of educators. After all, it becomes easier to take advantage of the low information voter when you provide them with even less information.
Naturally, there are some teachers that are subject area experts without college degrees. They teach are trades at our campus. However, this is a different story entirely. If we are teaching people how to read, perform complex math problems. and write you would hope the people teaching them are experts at teaching those subjects.
This is why many of us do what we do. We want the next generation to have some basic knowledge to make decisions on. We want them to move beyond memes and YouTube posts. It’s hard to get a complex and comprehensive view of the world on TikTok. We want them to have a sixth sense when someone is trying to pull a fast one on them.
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