Field Day

Mrs. Bison and I are now looking at nearly three months of child-filled summer. The local school district, having fulfilled its duty of educating our child for the pathetically small amount of days that they bother to do it, has unleashed it on us for the next eighty-one days. Not that we're counting, you understand...

The term ended with what they call "Field Day", which is a bit like Sports Day, but without any actual sports, or competition. There were cakes, though, so all the fat-arsed kids wouldn't be forced to endure an afternoon without lard. I remember Sports Day as an actual day of competition, when you found out who was the fastest kid in your year. We used to get little pieces of colored cloth on a safety-pin to show how we did: red for first place, blue for second and yellow for third. Not now though - don't want the little darlings to have to come face-to-face with real life yet.

I wouldn't mind if this was the only dumb thing they did at school but it seems to me that not a single week goes by without them having early dismissal, a day off, cakes for someone's birthday, a school trip somewhere, a class party or some other event that doesn't involve any bloody learning. If you compressed all the actual work they did it would mean closer to two hundred days off for the summer. (Which might be good news for the teachers.)

This isn't a bad school district though. They do at least teach them some basics, like multiplication tables. I heard on the news last night about some concept called "Reform Math", the basic premise of which seems to be that we should teach our kids to get sort of close to the right answer but not worry about them actually getting anything correct. What goat-brained, feeble-minded cockroach shagger thought that one up? I actually watched this female teacher with a vacant expression and a smarmy "we know what's best for you" smile explaining that it was important to prepare our kids for all sorts of jobs that we don't even know about yet. Two things you dumb bitch: firstly, if you don't know what they are, how can you prepare for them. And secondly, technology is making the small things in life matter more, not less. Remember the Hubble Telescope, that phenomenally expensive astronomical instrument rendered myopic by the distinction between metric and imperial measurements? How well do you think that would have worked if the engineers had only worried about getting the measurements "approximately right". The rocket wouldn't have got off the fucking ground. Probably wouldn't have even got it to light.

A whole generation is going to have their learning corrupted by shit like this, and by the insistence that we move at the pace of the slowest, most witless kid in the class. And by breaking for cakes and a class party every other day.

The problem is that you can't argue with these educationalists and their fuck-brained theories, because they don't have to justify them to you and me. They only have to persuade other educationalists, and as anyone who ever peeled back the lid on school politics will testify, no other facet of human life seems to attract so many fuckwits.

So let's take a walk down Reality Lane: high-tech industry is crying out for more H1B visas so they can bring in highly educated employees from, say, India. This is because our colleges are turning out people trained and qualified, at ever-increasing expense, for precisely fuck-all. Media Studies, Politics and History, American Literature - nothing that requires you to be right, only to show up and pay tuition.

So next time you're handing out the cakes at Field Day, listen very carefully. That's the sound of the future passing by. Better run faster to catch up...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison