Education vs. Everything Else Redux

A priceless study is being manifest on a daily basis – a research project that those benevolent souls looking for something “constructive” to muse about to the tune of 1,000 pages for their EdD would simply kill for.

The study could be entitled: The Reasons Why the Educational System in America Has Failed.

The data: The Marco Island High School non-debate.

The longer the notion of a high school on Marco Island is being discussed and studied, the more reasons we are entreated to as to why everything ever invented or conceived or imagined or what Immanuel Kant put forth as a noumenon should take precedence over education.

Here are this week’s reasons why a high school for exemplary education on Marco Island is a bad idea:

• Even discussing the high school hurts the feelings of Lely’s former, current, future, imaginary students, teachers, parents, administrators, landscapers, coaches, truant officers
• Having children watch solar panels on Track K is educational enough
• No one has voted for the high school
• It will crimp the syndicate’s plan to monopolize everything on Marco Island
• It would be a shame to pull 300 kids out of Lely and thereby “hurt Lely”
• Attending a big high school will prepare the student to absorb the shock of going to a university with 40,000 students
  

Notice that all of these pretexts are devoid of any educational context, meaning that hurting someone’s feelings, that watching solar panels, that voting for something that never needs a vote, that enriching the usual suspects, that the myriad numbers game … all trump education.

How sad. Every excuse relegates the welfare of children to a level that can be bartered for. And if the excuses weren’t pathetic in their own right, we could take the time and state the obvious with such retorts such as

• what in practice and in reality actually prepares a student to absorb the “shock” of going to any university of any size or stature is an exemplary education in the high school they graduated from
• Vote for a school? … despite the fact that no one has ever voted for Lely – or any other public school – for that matter. But you have to admit, this one is original given that no one voted for the 9-figure STRP boondoggle and that your congress today voted for a 18-figure spending plan WITHOUT HAVING READ THE PLAN
  

Need one go on?

Shouldn’t education – as in the absolute best one attainable – be the sole and irrefutable reason by which to make a decision on a school?

You would think so – presumably if thinking was required – oh, but, that’s right, thinking wasn’t mentioned either in this week’s reasons.