…in the 21st century we need teachers who teach math and science to have expertise in math and science. So there needs to be an upgrade there, and refocus on how much we value those teachers. As you know, in this country, we don’t pay our teachers all that well. We need to rethink that.
The problem isn’t that we don’t pay teachers well, at least on average. The problem is that we don’t pay the valuable ones enough, and we pay the worthless ones far too much, thanks to the unions. We need to be able to adequately compensate the teachers who have actual useful knowledge to impart, and get rid of the ones who don’t. This would all start by eliminating the worthless, or to be more accurate, negative-value, “education” major.
…in academia. But if you point it out, and urge them to be judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, you’re the racist.
…or your enemy. I’m fairly fastidious about this (as I am with apostrophes), and I no doubt annoy many people whose stuff I edit. As the piece points out, the purpose of a hyphen is to disambiguate adjectives, so you can tell for sure what is modifying what. For instance, “a light red fox” could be an underweight red fox, but “light-red fox” indicates that it is a fox (of indeterminate subspecies) that is light red in color. The exception is if the first word is an adverb, such as “lightly colored fox,” in which case the hyphen and connection of the two words is implicit.
It is wise to navigate through the news and elite wisdom through two landmarks: anything that Barack Obama says will be airbrushed, improved, or modified to fit facts post facto; anything Sarah Palin says or does will be contextualized in Neanderthal terms. Teams of Post and Times volunteers now sort through Sarah Palin’s email; not a reporter in the world is curious about what Barack Obama once said about Rashid Khalidi or the Columbia University GPA that won him entrance to Harvard Law School. Accept that asymmetry and almost everything not only makes sense about these two cultural guideposts, but can, by extension, explain the 1860-like division in American itself.
Go to Europe and see the left-wing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or third bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements, and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.
That was my score on this quiz. It really should have been 32 — I somehow misread the question on enemies during WW II, and read it as “allies.” And I accordingly was frustrated because none of the answers were correct (I just assumed that they meant the USSR instead of “Russia”). The only question I really missed (in terms of the actual knowledge, as opposed to misreading) was the one about the anti-Federalists. What’s dismaying, but not surprising, is how poorly not just the general public, but academics do. It would explain the disastrous results of many elections.
The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I’ll bet it’s got no plans to downsize.
Nor has the TSA. A 24-year-old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. “We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience,” said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!
The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.