Don't take our education for granite.
Say what you want, but this certainly counts as among the more noble-sounding reasons you've probably heard for
not spending money on schools.
During a House Education and Workforce Committee proceeding on Wednesday to reauthorize the nation’s elementary and secondary education law, Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) said, “Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle roughly speaking on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.”
Of course you don't need money to run a modern education system, you can do the whole damn thing with rocks if you wanted to. When I was in school we didn't have textbooks, we just had the rocks. Everyone quiet down and take out your rock, the teacher would say, and that's what we'd do. We sat on rocks, we wrote with rocks, we had rocks for lunch and we turned out fine. Our school subjects were divided into looking at rocks, hitting things with rocks and getting hit with rocks.
He later went on to say that he thinks the answer to improving education in this country “would be to get private sector folks into every one of our schools, get the CEOs in the schools and move beyond this just narrow policy debate and really have a revolution.”
Indeed, what we really need is to put a good CEO in charge of our schools, someone knows how to get us back to a good, solid rock-centered education system. Someone who can get the kids ready for real jobs in America's rock-based economy. With a little hard work, little Billy, maybe you'll be able to move off of your parent's rock and get a rock of your own. A nice, middle-class sedimentary rock, not a nasty igneous one.
The committee is considering a Republican version of reauthorization that could change the way federal funding is distributed to low-income students living in communities with high concentrations of poverty, or what is known as “portability.”
If all this talk sounds suspiciously like a plan to screw schools in poorer districts, congratulations, that's indeed exactly what it is. You, my friend, have not been living under a rock.