Dunce, ain't I?

After giggling through a particularly caustic email sent my way by someone purporting to be a public school teacher, I have a question in response.

Where is it written that a problem can be solved only after a decades-long infusion of unthinkable, unspeakable amounts of money?

If children are not being properly educated, deflecting even more money into the union coffers in perpetuity will correct that?

While I may be a dunce, spare me.

The way it’s always been presented to me, the public school teachers during my formative years were unjustly underpaid. Remarkably, I am a voracious reader, a somewhat capable writer and my math skills are second only to elite mathematicians.

If underpaid teachers can be equated with sub-par educating, explain to me how (on a disbelieving dare) I once drew a map of the entire world and forgetfully excluded only two countries?

How to calculate the square footage of a circular structure? Yep, those grossly uncompensated teachers of my day taught me that ancient trick.

Why did the long-haired kid hopelessly addicted to Les Pauls, Strats, distortion pedals and Marshall crates come to appreciate the undeniable genius of Beethoven? Mr. Umla gets the sole credit for that previously unthinkable development.

With that typed, my revolving-door of a parent pool contributed nothing more than reading my report cards and dispensing punishment when applicable.

Years later, I’d attend those annoying parent-teacher conferences only to be told by much higher compensated teachers that any and all educational deficiencies and shortcomings on the part of my children were attributable to a lack of parental involvement.

So, when teachers were poor, kids learned things in bunches. But now that the teachers have become very, very well-compensated, the kids learn less and less, the parents are at fault and the only way to get the kids learning again is by way of long-barreled gun with the words “collective bargaining” stamped on it?

But I’m a “dunce” and I “don’t get it?”

Sure I do. I get it. And that’s why the email came my way.

From each according to their proven abilities in the profitable private sector to each according to their insatiable needs in the red ink-spewing Sargasso Sea that is the public sector.

Dunce, ain’t I?

Buh-bye