SCHOOLS FALL BEHIND:GATES HAS DESIGNS I started off to write this piece several weeks ago, but my computer declared war on me and refused to cooperate. For three weeks nothing got written and thousands of people viewed the website and decided it had gone out of business, since it wasn’t being updated. I had it coming; I had been vowing in print to produce something new for the site every week and I didn’t. What can I say now except that I’m back and it will never happen again (I hope). For Easter, folks, please forgive your erring brother. When I began this item three weeks ago I started it off with a reference to Bill Gates and an article he had written on the subject of education. Since he’s one of the biggest employers in the world, he had to be taken seriously at the point where he said that he was “terrified” for our work force tomorrow. He had looked at the country’s high schools and found that just one-third of the kids attending them were being prepared for college while the rest were either dropping out or coasting along in “gut” courses only good for killing time. Mr. Gates thinks that this is a disaster and the only way to fix it is to demand that all the kids be prepared for college nation-wide, no matter what the cost might be. He’s already made it clear that he’s willing to put up his share of the cost, which is admirable on his part. He didn’t get where he is by avoiding risks or succumbing to defeatism about the prospect of reaching the goals he set for himself, but you have to wonder whether he might not be underestimating the difficulties facing anyone who tries to take on the monumental assignment of upgrading the quality of the American high school student and the school he or she goes to. It won’t be easy. Even Gates admits that nothing much will happen if, in addition to course changes he recommends, his protégés aren’t “surrounded by adults who push them to achieve”. That’s a tall order. If such adults were numerous to begin with, the high schools would already be doing what he wants them to do -- offering superior education to their detainees. There’s the rub. The people who complain about the numbers of those who remain poor in spite of the prosperity of the society at large get things by the wrong end. They imply that the losers are poor because the winners refuse to share with them. Not so. The fact is that prosperity means an increase in everything, including birth rates. A rich society showers money on the just and the unjust, so they increase and multiply. Work-averse people find enough money to live on and even to support their children, but “pushing them to achieve”? Forget about it. Gates doesn’t seem to understand this. His parents were librarians. He obviously doesn’t know anything about kids whose parents are junkies or alcoholics, or who live on welfare. Lots of Harvard people don’t. I believe all the governing class of this country should be compelled to watch “Cops” on TV. I’ve always avoided it myself because the cops are so obviously play-acting for the benefit of the camera. But their clients aren’t acting. They’re being their own sweet selves, rolling around in the mud to their heart’s content, belching and scratching and whining and cussing and lying to beat the band, while their women furnish a choral background. Bill would find attention to this show to be quite educational for him. It might give him a more realistic view of the obstacles his plan would have to surmount. He’s on record acknowledging that poverty and crime and environment are problems for it, but he overcame them in one sentence “We can put a stop to this”. Really? All the same I wish him luck with his project and only hope that he has his eyes open when he takes it on. With his record, he’s bound to get some results, so I’m not ready to write him off yet. Returning to “Cops” as an educational tool, I think the first compulsory audience for it should be the members of the Supreme Court. They can speculate for themselves how they’d like the humiliation of having to read his constitutional rights to some drunken skel in a dirty shirt and torn pants who’s more interested in getting rid of his crack stash in a hurry than hearing about the Constitution. I squirm when I see this, but I know it’s only for the cameras and it doesn’t happen when they’re not around. If the Justices want some real-life education about the underclass they could once in a while get out of their limousines and book passage on Amtrak between Washington and New York. They would learn a lot and hear some conversation that they won’t hear in their temple in Washington. But after all they’re appellate judges who never have to listen to a witness in a case, but get all their facts from papers and from lawyers. Heaven forbid they should ever have their judgment tainted by any first-hand knowledge, not of the people in any of their cases, but of the people of the country, who could very well include the types who appear in these cases. Very few of these types are to be met at the dinner parties and private-club gatherings the Justices frequent in their hours of ease. This is yet another argument for my proposal that the Court be moved out of Washington, where there is no need whatever for its presence and entirely too much risk of contamination from the political radioactivity there, and located in some central area of the country where the people will have more access to the Court and the Court will have a chance of meeting people who don’t live, eat and breathe politics every waking moment of their lives. The common thread connecting what I’ve written here about Bill Gates and about the Supreme Court Justices is their shared lack of knowledge of the criminal class of this country, which has battened on easy drug profits and easy handouts from the government until it has assumed such enormous proportions that far-left politicians are now starting to demand the vote for convicted felons, knowing that there are enough of them in the country to guarantee permanent control of the government to any party for which they would cast a bloc vote. The party, of course, would be the Democrats. They have now lost so many elections that they are ready to consider any maneuver that would put them back in the driver’s seat. It would be a happening. We would all get first-hand experience of what the South went through during Reconstruction after the Civil War. My history says the taxes of Louisiana alone went up 400 per cent and the state debt tripled, with no visible results in the form of public works, but with a corresponding increase in the private wealth of the imported legislators who laid the taxes and incurred the debt. History is a great thing, isn’t it? Why, I thought I’d never find out where New York got its ideas from, and now I have.
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