The headline article in today’s tiny-town local paper brags about the successful middle school program to reduce absences. The big photo at the top shows an administrator watching teens round a corner of a school building. He looks just like a corrections officer watching hourly movement of inmates from program to program to chow and to their cells.
The building, like all central-school-model buildings in Idaho, is a big, expensive, windowless, escape-resistant blockhouse.
The guard officer school administrator has the shaved head, FBI sunglasses and handheld radio as he stands apart watching the offenders inmates school children traverse their assigned routes.
The main excitement in the article was the reduction in escapes absences. Much like in our prisons where a good day is one where there was no fleeing, fighting or, uh, sex.
I suppose it is up to me to pose the silly question, “How about making school an interesting place that attracted kids to learn interesting things, challenge ideas, THINK and discuss?”
For some reason that is not what “we” want to do. We have one history, one set of “facts” and a behavior model of rote obedience that we want to be universally held. Resisters will be reprogrammed. Absence from programming is a criminal offense.
P.S.
Speaking of absences, my creative writing or need to post has been on a sabbatical.
I suspect, in part, because 1,000,000 Idahoans didn’t go to the polls to say they see the light, more big government is a disaster and we want to slash the heck out of the monster.
The main thing, however, is that we have been shopping, negotiating and are now moving shops, offices and our home into a new house a few miles down the snowy, icy roads from here. I haven’t met anyone who loves the moving process and admit to being every bit a normal man in this regard.
I’ll be back when this is all over.