The public education farce
‘My dear readers’, please bear with me for a bit, while I take ‘this important opportunity’ to use today’s column to pretend to be a PSS education czar condescendingly preaching to you all about the sanctimonious importance of a good public education, which, as we all know, “affects us all”–“and in more ways than one.” So please pardon the overwrought, pathetic, preachy prose filled with predictable, trite clichés and just bear with me while I illustrate absurdity by being absurd, to use Rush Limbaugh’s old rhetorical technique.
OK, here goes. Pretend that I am an old public school English teacher now.
Good morning, my ‘dear friends,’ students and colleagues. Or good afternoon, good evening, whichever the case may be, my ‘dear readers,’ ladies and gentlemen, or however you may wish to be addressed. I love you all. Today is a great day. And I am happy to have this tremendous opportunity to talk to you about the overwhelming importance of a good public education, which of course is very profound and the enormous responsibility of us all.
My name is “Mr. Pelliguro,” by the way, which, quite coincidentally, happens to means “dangerous” in Chamorro–“Pelliguro.” But you may just call me either “Phoney” or “Baloney,” whichever you prefer. I don’t care. After all, we are all friends here.
Anyway, let’s get down to business and talk about public education–the most important subject in the whole world to me. We talk about public education all the time. It never improves and we can never seem to agree on exactly what to do about it. Before I start knocking off stuff from the Internet in an attempt to mask the fact that I really have nothing important or novel to say, let me please tell you why this is so–why this is the case.
You see, public education is a necessity for us all–for our children and our children’s children! For the future! We owe it to ourselves and to everybody! It’s like food. We all need it and so the government must naturally provide it.
Imagine Public Education as one big, giant, public, government-run cafeteria in which we must promulgate a standardized menu that nobody can agree upon. We are basically spending all of our time fighting about the menu: about the curriculum, about standards, about what our children should be taught in school.
Now the most sensible and obvious thing to do would be to shut down the entire cafeteria and let students go to where they like the menu. We could just give them school vouchers and let the parents decide what they want, so we don’t have to keep fighting about what to do–about what to serve.
But we can’t just close down the cafeteria, because then we would have to fire people and lose power. Of course, we could never allow that–because we care! We love you! So we just have to keep fighting and fighting about the menu (over and over again)–about what to serve our kids. Students and parents have no choice!
By the way, did I mention that I love everybody, all of you, and that we should all love each other to death, even if it kills us?
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Strictly a personal view. Charles Reyes Jr. is a regular columnist of Saipan Tribune. Mr. Reyes may be reached at charlesraves@hotmail.com
