He won’t read my blog any more because I’m so bigoted against Republicans but I’ve got to say my life is a lot easier since I stopped debating with him. He also seems to take a very dim view of public educatation. He’s a big supporter of school vouchers which allow families ambitious for their children to escape public schools. Whenever I expressed reservations about vouchers he would quote the song’s dismissive beginning lyric, “when I think back on all the crap I learned in High School, its a wonder I can think at all.”
I love Paul Simon music but I never took that line too seriously even though from high school on I always thought my most serious learning came from my extra-curricular activities rather than actual classroom studies.
All the crap! What a line. What an indictment! What a lot of nonsense!
I woke this morning with about four or five ideas floating in my head each urgently pushing to be the first one I could start bloviating about on the blog. I won’t have time to attack them all this morning. I have both another sunny day to put up lawnsigns and (as I’ve just found out) another day to watch a sick little boy. We will get him at 11AM and I’ll probably excuse myself and let Claudia do the honors. And it is he’s such a sweet little sickie.
The posts have all been informed by my continuing front porch conversations. I’ve had a few dozen more over the weekend. I have yet to find a single person defend the Red Plan. The best argument its supporters are able to come up with is “Well, we had some schools that really needed fixing.” I always acknowledge that this was true but I don’t even need to add that the Red Plan took this logic to an illogical extreme.
So here are the ideas that ought to make for interesting posts.
Paying back Payback. Prompted by a Nancy Nilsen sign in one of the old warhorse supporters of the school it reminded me of the failed campaign we both supported over thirty years ago to push a major building referendum. In many ways the Red Plan was pushed by people angry about that failure even to justifying its remarkable avoidance of holding a referendum.
The next would be another reflection on the Selling Central series. It would riff off of the Tricia Waltman column in the Reader Weekly and that Simon and Garfunkle song. It would tie into a long counter reflection about public schools by one of the people who have opined about my blog. What is all the crap that Garfunkle was talking about.
I’d like to add my experience in public high school which was not at all crappy and contrast it with Tricia’s experience and elaborate on how that informs each of us about the Edison charter schools in Duluth.
The trickiest idea that wended its way into my thoughts is about a recent suicide by a student in one of our schools. Despite a void of information I commented on it a couple weeks ago at a forum on health in our schools. The suicide had been prayed over before that in our church. Last week an angry letter was published about it in the Reader Weekly. Finally last night an aquaintance sent me an email with more details suggesting that I read the letter and contemplate the School District’s handling of the incident.
Fortunately for me I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night stewing over all these things. That didn’t happen until I woke up around 5AM. Its a lot of ground for me to cover but I’ve got a threadbare newspaper to read, a PO box to check for donations and more leaflets to pass out along with lawnsigns. Oh yeah, and a sick little boy to bring over to our house.
Oh and one more thing about Kodachrome I never took that line about the crap in high school too seriously. That is probably because another one of its verses betrayed the total narcissism of the voice supposed to be singing it and by that I don’t mean Paul Simon. Think of the voice as being a creation of Simon like a character in a book a character who is an angry unpleasant person.
This guy also says that if he took all the girls he’d ever met and rolled them up into a ball they could never match his “sweet imagination.” What a jerk. How am I supposed to sympathize with some creep’s disaffection with high school when he has such a low opinion of all the women he’s met? Honest to God I knew so many neat and wonderful girls in high school. It was like a candy bowl. Rolling them all up into a ball? Talk about objectifying women. This lyric seems like it came from a guy who spent way too much of his time in the pages of Playboy or on porn sites.
