Today Is Not That Day, Part 6: Bonus Deluxe Edition

For those of you who haven't followed this blog for a long time, this post may be your introduction to "Today Is Not That Day". T.I.N.T.D. is a theory I have that one day I will say to myself, "Gee, I wish I sent my kids to school."

Maybe it'll be when Oprah visits the local middle school, or the President issues an executive order for homeschoolers to be round up and shot. Who knows? Until then, there a lot of reasons why Today Is Not That Day.

13% of the girls in this high school are pregnant. I love the reportage, too: "Some would say that movies, TV, videogames, lazy parents and lax discipline may all be to blame." Apparently, the notion that the place they spend eight hours a day might have something to do with it is so absurd, "some" wouldn't even say it! I'm not sure, but I think this is the school that is going to open a nursery across the street.

But it's the dances, and the sweet, romantic gang-rapes that homeschooled kids miss out on the most. (Actually, there are homeschool dances; after dance rapes, not so much.) Sometimes I think kids would be safer in an actual prison.

It's not all lax discipline, though. There's always zero tolerance to the rescue! Saving our beleaguered bureaucrats from having to think. It's so much easier to expel kids, you know: Just to be safe. (And slavish adherence to stupid rules is way more prevalent than rape, and probably more pervasively damaging to an institution that purports to educate.)

Finally, here's a funny and interesting 20 minute lecture by Sir Ken Robinson about schools and the stifling of creativity. I don't agree with everything he says, but the basic principle—that schools were meant to encourage one way of thinking and only on limited topics—I think is undeniable. (Thank God for teachers who are smarter than that, but the institution itself is designed to create workers for tomorrow's industrial economy. If "tomorrow" is ca. 1859.)

So, until the next day that is not that day: Question authority!