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Old February 12th, 2011 #10
Alex Linder
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Conversations with Biff, Part 7:

Public Education

Jimmy Cantrell

Note to Readers: This is the seventh Biff piece. The first six were all posted at lewrockwell.com. Anyone who has not read them might prefer to read at least the first one (http://www.lewrockwell.com/cantrell/cantrell16.html ). The four middle pieces are no longer available there, and anyone who wishes to read them to know about poor Biff’s adventures with Diversity-Sensitivity Training or a 23-year-old wife now starting graduate school may contact me. For this new Biff piece, I am using quotation marks to make it easier to follow.

The most wonderful thing about the Government School Year is that it means I get to hear extra traffic whenever I’m at home and awake and not brain-dead 30 minutes before 8:00 AM and 30 minutes after 3:00 PM. My street is a cut-through for soccer moms dropping the children off at the nearby Government grade school so they (the soccer moms) can be free to further empower themselves, whether that be through earning bucks for that special ski vacation or getting those buns and thighs just right at the health club (for you never know when you’ll need your assets to snare that next executive husband) or, most important to those who love freedom, volunteering at Planned Parenthood to help ensure that teenage girls everywhere will have the Right to abort without so much as a word to their potentially reactionary and intolerant parents.

Last spring, there was a wreck around the corner in the morning. Drawn by the crash, I walked over to see if my help was needed. It was, but not as would be expected. The Chevy Suburban, which appeared to have rammed the Ford Explorer in front of it because the Ford had stopped fully at the Stop sign, featured bumper stickers that read: Gore-Lieberman and Goddess Bless and Hate is Not a Family Value. The driver, wearing a tube top and short-shorts, was slobbering on her cell phone, canceling her appointment for a facial while yelling at her daughters to be calm. A Madonna CD provided background music.

So I go out this morning to round up Fergus before he knocks over someone’s trash can, and Biff is standing in his driveway, watching the road, shaking his head.

‘Morning, Biff,’ I say.

‘I don’t see you much in the morning,’ he answers. ‘The early bird catches the worm.’

‘Well,’ I reply, ‘that depends on the worm. Some worms likely are out only at night.’

‘Can’t deny the wisdom of the ages,’ he advises. ‘It’ll get you sooner or later. If you want that worm, it’s early to bed and early to rise. That’s what makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’

‘Wisdom from the past that is essentially materialistic aphorism,’ I suggest, ‘may not be the best to adopt as personal or national moral philosophy. Anyway, you stay up as late as I do, and I’ve got a baby in the house for excuse.’

‘That’s true,’ he acknowledges, ‘but if I’m going to have my fun time with Baby, I’ve got to do it when she’s in the mood. Plus, there’s the work I have to do at night to be ready to get back at the old salt mines in the morning.’

‘The investment rat race,’ I state.

‘Yep, but not as bad as that rat race,’ he declares while pointing to the road.

‘School traffic,’ I observe.

‘I tell you,’ he says leaning close to me, ‘I have no doubt that women driving with phones to their ears are at least as dangerous as teenage boys.’

‘Better not let Baby hear you say that,’ I suggest, ‘or your late nights will get you nothing. And she could report you to Joan Elyutt, who’d drag you back to Diversity-Sensitivity Training and make you a permanent blue eyes.’

He shudders. ‘That’s enough to make you go gay. Even if they have blue eyes, they are victims in need of Government protection and free from Joan Elyutt’s focus.’

‘That’s our world,’ I say. ‘Ain’t it brave and new?’

‘Hey,’ Biff almost shouts. ‘Have you been watching that Weakest Link show?’

‘I’ve seen it a couple of times,’ I answer.

‘Boy,’ he gushes, ‘I just love it. It makes Regis look like Howdy-Doody.’

‘I find it a little irritating after a while,’ I say. ‘Plus, I think it sets a terrible example.’

‘What do you mean?’ Biff asks. ‘They have lots of contestants of color.’

‘The postmodernist nihil obstat,’ I declare. ‘What I’ve seen is that by midway through, the middle range players start to vote off those who have shown they know more. And many of them are proud to admit what they’ve done. It’s a revelation of the dumbing into the middle that Postmodernist Welfare State Democracy all but requires.’

‘I never looked at it but as fun,’ Biff swears, ‘what with all the insults.’

‘You could call it,’ I suggest, ‘the revolt of the middling masses against the more intelligent. They use majority voting to get the best and brightest out of commission so they can use the system for themselves. A Swiftian nightmare.’

‘I for one,’ Biff asserts, ‘like that. Just because you know all the answers doesn’t mean you should win a game or make the important decisions. The people’s will is Supreme. If they vote you out, you’re gone.’

‘Kind of like what’s happened to education,’ I offer, ‘with much of the best tossed aside and the average and worse elevated in the name of democratic education.’

‘That’s right,’ Biff agrees. ‘In democracy, education is supposed to be about making good citizens who love their Government and will work to make the country more tolerant, and for that to happen it has to be equally available and understandable to all.’

‘And to think,’ I state, ‘that I was under the delusion that education should be about educating toward the best possible accomplishment by teaching the best works and demanding high standards. Excellence from a few benefits all, as history shows repeatedly in technological innovation as well as in theology and literature.’

‘Sounds old fashioned to me,’ Biff confesses. ‘Today, you have to uplift the self-esteem.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I moan. ‘College students who can’t even comprehend Tom Sawyer without Cliff’s Notes are in dire need of greater self-esteem as they traipse off to Cancun for Spring Break debaucheries.’

‘You said it,’ Biff says. ‘If they don’t have that self-esteem, they’ll feel like they can’t do the work, so to help them get the self-esteem you make the work easy enough for them to do. Then they feel good.’

Even though I know Biff was a Business major, I am tempted to ask about his Education degree. Instead I acknowledge, ‘that’s the plan we’ve been on for three or four decades, and look where it’s gotten us.’

‘Much more diversity,’ Biff chirps. ‘As Baby wrote in one of her A English papers, why waste time on dead white men, anti-Semites like Dante and Dostoevsky, when you can read Gertrude Stein and Alice Walker and strike blows against injustice and intolerance?’

‘That’s a principle reason for both the dearth of thinking skills among the recent college educated and the huge growth in homeschooling,’ I declare.

‘Whatever. I say that’s just plain un-American,’ Biff asserts.

‘Fawningly teaching the likes of Gertrude Stein and Alice Walker while the Classics of Western Civilization, not to mention virtually all white Southern men —or to be more precise in a time of Truman Capote adulation, heterosexual white Southern men— are either ignored or denigrated,’ I query.

‘You are one big kidder,’ Biff laughs. ‘Homeschooling is what’s un-American.’

‘Refresh me on that,’ I plead.

He grins, as if certain I’m funning him. ‘Well,’ he starts, ‘the public schools are there to promote good citizenship. To make new citizens who will support the Government and be loyal. So anything that takes away from that is un-American. Take the kids out of public schools, and the schools lose some money and the kids might not be molded to be good citizens for our multicultural society.’

‘Interesting emphases,’ I say.

‘Homeschooling contributes to social turmoil,’ Biff avers.

‘I’ve heard that expressed before,’ I acknowledge, ‘but no one has ever explained it to me.’

‘Simple,’ Biff says. ‘I betcha most Home School parents in the South don’t teach their children how evil the South has been, especially that what’s-his-name’s cross racist flag, and that is not good for the indivisible America I love that takes democracy and freedom around the world at great cost.’

‘You may be right about that,’ I admit.

‘And then consider Choice,’ Biff continues. ‘We can’t have peace in our nation if we don’t accept diversity, and most homeschooling parents are opposed to abortion on demand. That means they misuse education to advance a social agenda. If those kids went to public schools, they would learn to be tolerant of diversity, which includes accepting that abortion is legal and has to be kept that way. And that the public schools are the safeguard of Liberal Democracy.’

‘Now I get it,’ I say. ‘It is intolerant to be opposed to those things that have been set aside as untouchable by the public school muckety-mucks, and homeschool parents tend to be opposed to most or all of that list. So they are not only keeping their children from the Government schools that would shepherd those children into compliance, but they are working to show up the public schools as intellectual failures and thus draw more parents into homeschooling.’

‘I’ll give you an example of how it works,’ Biff says. ‘Arkansas.’

The smirk on Biff’s face speaks volumes. ‘What about Arkansas?’ I prod.

‘You know how it is,’ he answers. ‘Bunch of Hillbillies. That Hog call for football, it’s nothing but the racist Rebel Yell, stirring up prejudices. The Ozarks Hillbillies who aren’t indulging in incest are Christian fanatics. Just the types to homeschool. The PBS station in Arkansas, AETN, had a contest for school kids on writing their own story and illustrating it. And do you know that some homeschool parents had the gall to demand that their children be allowed to enter.’

‘Amazing,’ I gasp.

‘I’m not kidding,’ Biff assures me. ‘AETN is public TV, not private, and its services are for those in the public, and for schools that means for public schools.’

‘That’s some take,’ I state.

‘It gets worse,’ Biff warns. ‘The contest was blind, to try to make the judging fair, and a homeschooled boy won. For the whole state.’

‘Tsk, tsk,’ I mouth.

‘I’m not through,’ Biff continues. ‘The winner was to have his teacher honored and his classroom to receive a TV, to use it to help educate the children.’

‘More TV,’ I note. ‘A tried and true Leftist solution.’

‘That mother,’ Biff informs me, ‘actually believed that she should receive the honor as teacher and that either she or the area home school association should get that TV.’

‘Neither could they blush, old Jeremiah wrote,’ I say. ‘And he wasn’t much on propping up decadent Government either.’

‘It’s a mess,’ Biff declares with his eyes squinted, probably because the only Jeremiah he knows about is the bullfrog in the Hoyt Axton song made famous by Three Dog Night. ‘At least AETN refused to let homeschoolers get the TV. They didn’t cave in to extremists like so many people today do. And you know most of those homeschool parents are pushy! Christians,’ Biff adds with a wink. ‘The ones of that boy that won the Arkansas contest, they go to church all the time. I don’t mean like normal people do: at Christmas and Easter and for weddings and funerals and maybe a few other times each year. I mean they go a couple times a week. Whew,’ Biff virtually spits. ‘I had a couple of aunts that did that. Praying and crossing themselves and talking about Jesus, as if what some man did and said two thousand years ago matters today.’

‘Can’t have that backward wisdom of the ages running people’s lives in our advanced times,’ I intone.

‘What a waste of time,’ Biff continues as if I had said nothing, ‘and a way to get convinced that the out of time belongs today. And they clearly don’t care about their country. Those homeschool parents.’

‘How’s that,’ I wonder.

‘Well,’ Biff answers, ‘the public schools are the frontline in the War for multicultural diversity to make America a better, more inclusive, nation, the permanently indivisible kind Gertrude Stein and Alice Walker and Baby’s professors would say is justice. And these Home School parents are failing to give their children to aid that cause.’

‘That’s something to think about,’ I admit.

‘And it gets worse,’ Biff says. ‘Those homeschooled kids who win those contests, like that one in Arkansas and those Spelling and Geography Bees, they may convince people that kids get better educations at home than in today’s public schools. And people who believe that and are ready to make a sacrifice for their children will take their kids out of Government schools. Especially those that are old-fashioned intolerant Christians will jump ship; then the schools will get less money. And where does that leave us as we try to mold the next generation to embrace Multiculturalism and Choice?’

‘Well—’ I start.

‘And,’ Biff jumps back in, ‘just think about this war on terrorism. The public schools teach patriotism: to love the flag and follow our Government leaders. When I was younger, I didn’t understand the need of that, but I do now. Without that, we might not have enough young men to serve, and then how would we bomb and enforce no-fly zones over those places like Iraq and Serbia that are so violent and threatening to peace? How would we wage wars against terrorism, fundamentalism, and intolerance to make the world safe for our Multicultural, Pro-Choice way of life?’

‘I hazard to say that the fact that so few parents consider these questions is of great comfort to Baby and her professors,’ I asserted.

Jimmy Cantrell

http://web.archive.org/web/200204230...C20011118.html