The Concrete Cowboy

Field trip bound, their bus broke down (or maybe they just forgot to plug it in.) So now their kids are trippin’ in another field.

Mine.

Out past the You are Now Leaving sign, beyond wifi connectivity and thirty minute pizza delivery, to a place GPS claims doesn’t exist.

…snapping selfies, climbing all over the broken down Farmall and rusted-out ‘62 Split-window Combi (like they’d know what to do with either).

They pretend to be in-tune, lip-syncin’ songs of peace an’ love but quietly snicker at our muddied and scuff’d boots and dirty overalls… like we’re something from outer space.

Welcome to what’s left of old school.

A faded Forty-Eight flies high out beside the barn, guarding the entryway is an at-the-ready thirty-aught-six, and over the fireplace hand-carved in the mantle… Joshua Twenty-four Fifteen in 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐉𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬.

Sure… there’s a lot we don’t know and even more we’ll just never get right, but at least we know what pronouns we are.

And for whatever we don’t care to know, maybe we’re just blessed.

“For we walk by faith, not by GPS.” ^{2 Corinthians 5:7 -ish}

Today, kids spend more days in school, more hours in class, more free-time on homework, and know even less. Of course, education, the enemy of common sense, needs quite a bit of time to fill minds with stuff that just ain’t so. Like…

America is racist
Capitalism is theft, and of course…
White men are evil

…leaving little time for truth.

Well… not 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐓𝐇 truth. Education’s truth is a mile wide and an inch deep. Like a binder inked in doodles, everyone has there own and is allowed to express their own however their imagination flows. Unless, of course, they actually believe in the 𝐀𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭 of Truth… the 𝐈 𝐀𝐌 of Truth, then like… no truth for you.

And education’s god of truth is a woman… well, kinda. She’s a palm-sized AI chatbot, and her First Commandment is:

Don’t drop your truth in the neighboring moo’s poo

Truth be told, everything your kid needs to know can be known in half a day maybe twice a week with…

No homework

What is homework anyway? but a claim that your child belongs to the state.

Children enjoy learning.

Learning is a sweet and natural thing (or oughta be) and ought not be coerced. Mandatory anything is indoctrination. But educators have bastardized learning. They preach individuality but demand conformity. Like Christmas Eve on aunt Molly’s farm, children are dressed in matching outfits then in a songless chorus of bells and bullhorns herded from one cowpen to another.

Learning thrives in the wellspring of freedom, including (and especially) the freedom to go or not go. That is the question, Shakespeare, or maybe this is:

You can lead a fool to school but can you make him think?

Probably not.

But it gets worse: To make unfree education free, socialists force all children to go and everyone else to pay, making free education most unfree. No wonder kids are bad at math.

…and history. Socialism has been tried and failed everywhere everytime: Cuba, Venezuela, Plymouth Rock…

To secure funding for their voyage to a mask-free New World, the Pilgrims were forced to live by education’s favorite form of funding: Collectivism (informally known as: 𝚻𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧) and peddling overpriced guilt-induced chocolate door-to-door. And yet, in a land flowing with milk and honey, the settlement nearly starved to death.

Until the entire democrat concept was scrapped by Brother Bradford forcing his commie-hugging colonists to cough-up their own lunch money.

…another reason for Gov-Ed to despise Thanksgiving.

Every election season, reforms fill the political air and take on cartoonish shapes. But the answer is neither Red nor Blue, because all solutions sketched by the nation’s nannies are drawn in the same humorless ink – green.

Federal green ink
State green ink
Property green ink
Poor green ink (State-run lotteries)
Box Tops for Education along with…
Tin-cup street corner waifs begging for spare pocket change

All of which adds up to “…where have all the flowers gone?” ♬

But money doesn’t solve problems. Money doesn’t even solve money problems. So why palm the Queen if it doesn’t fill a low straight?

Yeah… Maggie was right: The problem with education is that eventually you run out of socialists (…or something like that).

Merriam-Webster: in-cor-ri-gi-ble |adjective| in-ˈkór-ə-jə-bəl: incapable of being reformed

If socialism is the equality of misery, what then is the equality of stupidity?

Education.

…which cannot be reformed because education like socialism has no customers. And no, parents are not customers. What they are is in the way.

Remove not the ancient landmarks, which thy fathers have set, unless they just piss thee off. ^{Proverbs 22:28 NSV (New Snowflake Version)}

Education has this appetite for confiscatory funding, a hallucinogenic view of self-importance, and lust for blind worship. So, why is anyone surprised when students graduate into the narcissistic tyrants they were taught to be?

Like Pringles from a can, they tumble from their cookie-cutter classrooms with pitchforks in their fists and paint cans in their hands to tear down everything that came before them – everything that is not them. (Is there anything more pathetic than selfie-snapping bed-wetters dancing on a lifeless pile of steel and rubble like it cared?)

Though not all the monuments were of Robert E. Lee:

• For every action there is an unequal and obscene police reaction
• Two plus two equals White Supremacy
• LGBT ^{(…E-I-E-I-O ♬)} created He them. ^{Genesis 1:27 NKJ (not the King James)}

…‘til finally, untethered from morality, reality, and mommy’s apron-strings, the whiny pee-pee’rs graduate to some acronym’d bureaucracy in Fantasy-land on the Potomac.

So, say good-bye to your:

Light bulbs
Gas stoves and
Barn-find ‘69 GTO

Yup… textbook. Just the way Marx drew it up. (…that would be Karl not Groucho.)

Later that day…

With a whiff of ether, a lanky but intrepid Barney and Fred double-clutched our sputtering stepside’s three-on-a-tree out into the gravel lane to jump-start their yellow International back from whence it came. They learned something today… something they won’t soon forget.

No quiz
No grade
No duh

Too bad tomorrow they have to go back to school.

Yeah… education may be all about the getting of knowledge and whatnot, but there remains one getting they still ain’t got.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. ^{Proverbs 4:7}

Kids need less classtime and more playtime, time with dad, and the Flintstones.

Actually everything worth getting is gotten way beyond the classroom, through hard knocks, broken hearts, and skinned knees. Especially life’s most essential ingredients: Character and faith.

School is not just out. It’s way out.

A one and a two… ♬

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights
The goal of education is to obtain a diploma, not an education. The diploma is needed to pay for the education. The education is not.