On the Prescience of Samuel Clemens

He’s still got it.

One of the sagest commentators on the 21st century American education system died almost 120 years ago. It was, after all, Mark Twain who famously noted that “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.” Curmie continues to shake his head in wonderment at the perspicacity of that observation. 

Three cases in point from recent news stories. First up: what appears to be a nationwide effort to eliminate honors and AP courses in the name of some perverse definition of inclusion. The most recent case the Curmie read about was in Culver City, California, but these efforts appear to be bordering on the ubiquitous. 

Apparently, black and brown students were “under-represented” in those classes. All they had to do was opt in, of course; there was no criterion other than student (and one presumes parental) interest. The solution: provide more of those students with the ability to prosper in those advanced courses and an appropriate understanding of the value of taking challenging classes? Of course not! 

No, the morons in charge decided that challenging good students, providing them with both the skills and the credentials to get into good colleges, and generally rewarding aptitude and work ethic had to be abandoned because equal outcomes, not opportunities are what matter. (One suspects that such entirely race-based considerations are not similarly manifested in such decisions as who gets playing time on the basketball team. Meow.) 

One argument is that students who weren’t guided into accelerated classes at a younger age now feel they’re incapable of competing in honors courses at the high school level. Two responses, the first of which is a bisyllabic term for bovine feces. The second: hey, in the unlikely event that this argument has validity, why don’t we try steering promising students of whatever race into those more challenging courses earlier in their school careers? 

It might also be worth noting that the presence of really good students in a class is likely to cause more self-image problems for the average high schooler than being placed in a “regular” section of math or English or whatever would. Curmie isn’t advocating for Brave New World segregation here, but being surrounded by peers rather than superiors does have clear psychological advantages. 

Joanna Schaenman, a parent who wants her child to have access to honors courses, argues that “We really feel equity means offering opportunities to students of diverse backgrounds, not taking away opportunities for advanced education and study.” This kind of mature and intelligent thinking, of course, is unlikely to sway a school board whose sole objective seems to be to prove Twain an optimist. 

Last year, Jon Kean, a school board member in Santa Monica proclaimed that “This is not a social experiment. This is a sound pedagogical approach to education.” At last report, Mr. Kean has learned how to feed himself, and is making progress towards dressing himself without assistance. Potty training is taking a little longer than expected. 

Curmie, of course, is a veteran of advanced courses as both a student and an educator. Slowing down a class because the weaker students can’t or won’t keep up is a great way to make sure that everyone in the class is bored and (therefore) under-achieving. It also leads pretty directly to students’ finding other attractions: sex and drugs being at the top of the list. (Not everyone likes rock and roll, after all.) Years of experience in an actual classroom setting suggest that the way to get results is to set the bar high and provide students with the tools they need to clear it. 

There is nothing wrong with a student who doesn’t excel at one or more subjects. Some of the best students in an upper-level theatre history class struggle with a course that looks remarkably similar to an algebra class Curmie took in 7th grade. Similarly, Curmie once had a student who was apparently a brilliant physicist (as suggested by a full ride to an Ivy League university)… the young man could barely construct a sentence, let alone a paragraph. 

And, by the way, being merely adequate across the board is okay, too. So you learn a trade or go to Compasspoint State instead of Stanford… you’ll be fine… well, unless you run for school board, at least. But putting lower-achieving students, whether they fare poorer because of aptitude or attitude, in the same room with that slam-dunk Stanford admit helps neither of them. Good students, irrespective of race, are good students; bad students, irrespective of race, are not. 

Ah, but this is all stupidity from the left; and the idiots on the right are demanding at least equal time. Curmie, the very soul of benevolence, is happy to oblige. 

So let’s go to North Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, located in what one Curmiphile has described as “part of the great political wasteland between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.” There, the school board vetoed the local high school’s decision to present The Addams Family Musical next spring. Oh boy, here we go again. 

The loudest voice in opposition to the play, apparently, was Troy Williams, who’s also the pastor of the Calvary Church in Lebanon. Sigh. “If we promote it, we permit it,” quoth he in one of the most inarticulate utterances ever spouted even by a school board member. 

The notion of exaggeration for comic effect appears to be too heady intellectual fare for the Lebanon school board. Board VP Michael Marlowe objects to scenes of children smoking, references to liking torture and self-harm. Sigh (again). Curmie hasn’t seem the musical, but strongly suspects that these “dark” themes and characters are presented as humorous juxtapositions, not as role models. 

To be fair, Curmie, ever the theatre historian, is reminded of one of the medieval Christian Church’s objections to theatre: that the Vice character was inevitably far more interesting than the pious characters intended to be the heroes and heroines of the plays. The modern variation on this is that if you’re watching a TV mystery show, the villain is quite likely to be the best-known guest star, because the villain is not only the most fun to watch, but also to play. 

Still, it’s worth noting two things. First, The Addams Family Musicalis extremely popular high school fare: it ranked #3 in the country last year, even higher than The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which another gaggle of censorious asshats derailed at another high school about five hours to the west. This suggests that a whole lot of school boards, superintendents, and principals across the country found the script pretty innocuous. 

Which takes us to point #2: one of the show’s supporters on the board was Reverend Robb Faller. Yes, Reverend Faller is the pastor of the local Methodist Church. It’s more than a little problematic that two of the nine members of the school board are ministers, but at least one of them has functioning grey cells. Alas, only one other board member agreed. 

The good news, such as it is, is that at least the decision came now, rather than after faculty and students had committed thousands of person-hours of work and thousands of dollars for non-refundable expenses, as has too often been the case of late. Curmie has lamented the late cancellations of a number of plays and musicals over the years. Small favors, eh? 

Finally (for this go-round), there is the pièce de resistance. At Tallahassee Classical School, a public charter in (you guessed, Gentle Reader) Florida, Principal Hope Carrasquilla was forced out because… wait for it… 6th graders were allowed to view photos of Michelangelo’s David and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 

This from a school that purports to provide “a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.” As one of Curmie’s more colorful uncles might have said, “classical education, my rosy-red ass.” Yes, the works in question are technically Renaissance rather than strictly-speaking “classical,” but Curmie is pretty damned certain that examining a pair of the greatest (and most famous) artworks in human history is precisely what that school is selling. 

Board chairman Barney Bishop III would have us believe three things. In an often borderline incoherent interview with Slate’s Dan Kois (this is the “edited for clarity” version?), he first argues that Carrasquilla wasn’t, in fact, fired, but rather threatened with being fired if she didn’t resign. In Curmie’s world, this is a definition by example of a distinction without a difference. 

Secondly, Bishop asserts that the dismissal was the culmination of a series of problems with Carrasquilla, not the sole cause. Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall aptly describes this claim as being “the penis that broke the camel’s back,” and suggests that it “sounds like a cover story.”  Curmie has read literally thousands of Ethics Alarms posts over the years; Jack’s cynicism is seldom misplaced.

Finally, Bishop argues that the problem wasn’t showing the images per se (“Gosh, we’re a classical school. Why wouldn’t we show Renaissance art to children?”), but rather the fact that parents weren’t alerted to the “controversial” content in advance. Apparently the teacher wrote a letter, but due to a “series of miscommunications” the letter wasn’t sent out. Curmie, wild-eyed leftie that he is, sees nothing whatsoever controversial about those images, but the teacher, in a recognition of parental hysteria for its own sake an abundance of caution initiated the warning process. 

And then came the no doubt inevitable outrage from a grand total of three parents, to which Bishop and his cohorts/underlings meekly capitulated. The fact that even Bishop admits that “98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem” is apparently irrelevant. Curmie, were he of a cynical disposition (I know… go with me here, Gentle Reader), might suggest that to describe the depiction of a flaccid penis on a marble representation of an idealized male body as “pornographic” is to demonstrate that the problem is with the viewer, not the sculpture, which, over the last several hundred years has been seen in person by literally millions of pre-teens with no apparent ill effects. Oh, and by the way, a teacher saying “nonpornographic” isn’t an issue to any sentient adult, which of course excludes Bishop. 

Curmie might even argue that given the fact that Carrasquilla was the third principal in the school’s less-than-three-year history, that if Bishop is really looking for the problem, he might stop placing the blame on principals and start pondering the role of that fella gazing back at him from the mirror. Statements like “even poor people have standards” don’t help. 

The major issue here is far more significant, however. The idea that parents should be able to have a say in how the education system works is, or at least ought to be, self-evident. But Bishop’s statement that “Parental rights trump everything else” is not merely problematic, but chilling. No, they don’t, or at least they damned well shouldn’t. Education is not, cannot be, about serving up whatever pabulum the most insular and doctrinaire parents want. It’s about students, and what is best for them must be the primary objective. 

Bishop’s comments demonstrate pretty clearly that Tallahassee Classical’s claims to an emphasis on classical learning is, in a phrase often employed by Curmie’s mom, so much balloon juice.  Rather, the real objective is more about force-feeding a political ideology fully as narrowminded as the “woke” agenda Bishop alleges to be rampant in the public schools. His leadership style seems to be to accede to every heckler’s veto in sight, while abrogating his responsibilities to the people who really matter: the students.  

This way lies the abyss.