An Abandoned Paper...

You find them often enough, the newspaper someone was browsing while getting around a cup of java.  They get up to go on their way, leave their newspaper behind and someone like me comes along and goes “aha... reading material!”  Over the years I’ve found such abandoned papers are one of fate’s better ways of pointing out something in need of attention.  I always take a look, and I always leave it where I found it.  After all, fate might have had more than one person in mind when it tickled reality to have that paper laying there in the first place, you never really know.

Last night such a paper found its’ way to me.  Burned out on drawing, tapped out on the fictions, totally bummed out by the diner drama (have you ever noticed how the less there is to fight for the more ferociously people fight for it?) the paper was sanctuary.  I dove right in.  A couple of pages in I found what I’m thinking fate wanted me to take a look at, and look at it I did.  Then I thought about it, went home, slept, and got up to think about it some more.

The article dealt with education, to be specific the standardized test scores for a local metropolitan region.  Make it eight column inches of carefully worded slip-slide rationalizations and a table of dry numbers.  One of those “ok, we published it, now get off our back” kind of things the public servants are required to do every couple of years.  The numbers validated what everyone knows: education is a failing system, the kids’ performance falling steadily when measured against objective standards.  What’s worse is the numbers I was looking at had been “renormalized”... their way of saying doctored to whitewash the situation as much as possible, one of those lipstick on a pig sort of things.  Sorry guys, but I don’t give a damn if Revlon loves you or not, when you get out the garden hose and wash off the psychobabble crap the fact is that the kids are dumber than ever.  Nothing new in that, it’s been a steady decline for going on forty years now, certainly for the last twenty or so as technology has taken over every facet of life.  But it did put my focus on something that’s going to be needed, something where a few hours of forethought now might be worth years of effort later.

The Crackerbush Village (see “A Bedtime Story...”) is a worthy cause I support.  By design a fair number of those living in the village will be kids transitioning into adulthood from the foster care systems, and it is their ultimate education I’ve been considering. 

The economic side of the village is based on integrating the emerging technologies of  alternate energy into proven systems ready to go into general service.  The step between prototypes and production ready offerings takes time, you simply must shake out the bugs in real world operation, there is no other way.  Such testing is a very needed thing for a new product to succeed.  But the people who will take those new offerings into the market place are an equally critical component of success, and it is the human side of the equation I’m focusing on tonight.

The basic idea of the kids is to bring in the older children from the foster system, those in the fourteen to seventeen range and apprentice them to the craftsmen who are involved with testing the new technologies, in essence nurture the kids and the new technologies in parallel so that when the kids achieve their majority and step out as full adults they do so with a proven skill and trade on the cutting edge of a growing market.  To do that will require education that works, and that is where my head has been for a few hours now. 

What will be needed to turn around and defeat all the damage done by the psychobabble bullshit that has invaded and despoiled public education? What will be needed to provide those kids with a fair and fighting chance at success in the world?  I don’t rightly know, not yet, but I know finding a few good people who do know is now high on my priority list.  Somehow I think it will ultimately come down to picking the adults who will crew the Crackerbush such that they are each and every one true teachers sans the social feces of public education’s mandatory mediocre impotence that has evolved to keep a (*hack-spit*) service based economy going.  The Crackerbush is going to need better than that.

On the good side I have had the distinct honor and privilege of having known a couple of men in my life to stand as a template of such teachers, I have a decent chance of recognizing one should we meet.  One was my former boss Art, a teacher who came later in my life in the chemical plant days (see “Pirates...”).  But the first man I met who could stand in such a role was very early in my life, at a point in my life when I was only one step away from being a candidate for the Crackerbush village in my own right.  He taught me how to think a problem under the cover of teaching us drafting, mechanical drawing, he taught me and who knows how many more to actually think, much to the mortification of those hustling the early “feel good” movement running amuk through the schools. 

I’ll never forget the day we met.  Mr. Raleigh stepped in front of his new class, looked us over each and every one of us, scowled, and snorted. “I don’t have the time to teach you dumb-ass yard apes the science of engineering,”  he said, and then continuing on in what I’ve since realized was one of the most seductive tones of voice I’ve ever heard come out of a male mouth, “but if you’ll hang with me I can teach you the art of the thing.”  

Finding folks like that to crew the Crackerbush is most definitely a high priority.  There has to be a few of them left, please God, give me to know there’s a few of them left...