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> From: “Greg Swann” <gswann@presenceofmind.net>
> To: “Mrs. Linda Holloway” <linhosbe@aol.com>, > CC: “Arizona Education Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan” <lkeegan@mail1.ade.state.az.us>, > BCC: <suppressed> > Subject: Guerrilla Schooling #3: Less is more is a huge step forward in the content area > Date: Sun, Aug 15, 1999, 6:47 AM |
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Less is more is a huge step forward in the content area“I personally believe that improving the specificity, the clarity and the content area of our standards is a huge step forward.” So says Mr. Scott Hill of Abilene, Kansas, whose name is found in the “To:” line above. Mr. Hill was speaking of the deletion of the paragraphs concerning evolution from the Kansas state public school curriculum guidelines. Less evolution is more specificity and clarity, he says. In the content area. Where else? And while we disagree with his assertion, we agree completely with the larger point: Deleting the entire curriculum would have been a step forward nearly infinite in extent. We know all about state standards, alas. Minimum standards inevitably become maximum standards. This would be bad enough, but it is invariably the case that some significant fraction of students will manage to prove themselves unable to achieve even the paltry minimum, so ever-newer, ever-lower minimum standards must be contrived. How low can we go? It’s a mystery. Charles Darwin wasn’t looking in that direction, after all. And while the six names gracing the “To:” line—the six members of the State Board of Education who voted to expel Darwin from the Kansas public schools—are assuredly not the missing link between man and the apes, nevertheless they are this issue’s honorary baboons. And, yes, there is a new issue of Guerrilla Schooling, a web-based magazine concerned with practical strategies for wresting a rigorous academic education for our children from an education establishment stoutly committed to doing everything but providing rigorous academic education. We are guerrillas, not reformers, and what we seek is a real education, not any of the many unreasonable, unreasoning facsimiles. For our children, not all children everywhere. Now, while they’re still children. You can see the progress of our evolution at: http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/ Thereat we have a bit to say about “The Great Books of Western Civilization,” since the only antidote to this poisonous Kansas baboonery is to dine instead with human beings who dare to be human beings. For this same reason we sup again with Dr. Richard Mitchell, who elsewhere has presented a complete and detailed map of the content area, a vast region of nearly-incomprehensible nebulosity that is, like the universe as tantrummed up by the babyish baboons of Kansas, something less than ten thousand years old. To round things out we converse with the muses, we hope amusingly, on the subject of academic censorship. And just so you don’t think we have nothing good to say about the Kansas State Board of Education, consider this: At least one of our honorary baboons elected to omit something from the proposed curriculum guidelines because it was really, really stupid. This is quoted from an article by Scott Rothschild of the Wichita Eagle:
Too childish for first-graders. Too childish for anyone but professors of education, who bring these nonsense exercises back from their forays into the content area in order to fool people—evidently including some of the other school board members—into thinking they are not depriving innocent children of the gifts of reason. So: Go to the head of the class, Dr. Abrams. You are one bright baboon. And for the benefit of our honored guests, we’ll repeat this:
As always, we crave links and email addresses. And we commend you to forward/repost/reprint from the site at will, this time with emphasis. Ordinary educationist stupidity is a weed that always needs pulling, but censorship, even censorship of this mild Kansan strain, calls for the application of broadcast herbicides. Especially out there in the content area. Until next time, Greg Swann
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