Today's Educational Oddity

Or as Mark Shea would title it: Reason #4593948739 to Home School Your Kids

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2489900

This paragraph is the most impressive: "A student sitting in the ninth grade at age 17 is a kid who is going to say, `Forget this, I'm dropping out,' " Stripling said in a news release. "What we need to do is give that child a chance to earn promotion to the next grade while at the same time we give that student extra academic help to pass the class he failed."

So says the SUPERINTENDENT of the district.

I wish my employer were this understanding. You know, allow me to grow completely stagnant in my job, but worry that I might just say "Forget this" (is it just me or do you think maybe she initially said, "F*** This!" and then thought better of it and asked the reporter to moderate her comments???) if he doesn't find a way to have me earn a "promotion" that doesn't hinge upon me actually doing, you know, work, and stuff.

Yeesh, indeed.

This isn't Social Promotion, they said. They still have to earn the diploma, they insisted. But if they can't earn it the way everyone else does, then we'll find some other way they can earn it, they didn't say. We'll lower the bar for you, they should have said.

This isn't how life works. It isn't how relationships work, or how employment works, or how anything works. What service are we providing this student if we do this? I'll tell you what we accomplish: we make ourselves feel better at the expense of legitimately empowering a young student with the tools that might actually allow him to be productive, live a life that is fruitful, perhaps raise a family, enjoy life, love, and laughter.

Education isn't EVERYTHING. In my years, I've known some folks who weren't "book learned" but who were good human beings, with something to offer the world, and who had knowledge of the kind you learn outside of a school-and-books setting. But what is being discussed here is an anti-education poison which effectively enslaves people in a web of dependency and victimization. Shame on us as a society if we would sacrifice the youth of our nation at the altar of making ourselves feel good about "helping" someone with the kind of "help" I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.