Obama’s back-to-school speech was interestingly toothless and not deserving of the controversy it stirred-up. And didn’t his message fall on deaf ears?
Who said, the children are our future?
My niece, who’s just a couple of months shy of her 17th birthday, has been rebelling of late. She hates school — hates her parents. Doesn’t seem to have time for anyone or anything but her loser boyfriend — some tool who, though he graduated last June, has no interest in college or holding down a job. Instead, he stays out all night and sleeps all day. My niece thinks he’s cool, though. In many ways, she’s a typical teenager. Teens are serious about what they’re serious about: the opposite sex, the latest in fashion, entertainment and gadgetry. Their shoes, their acne treatment, the number of friends on MySpace. First cars. First sex. texting until their fingers bleed.
All that would be fine if they weren’t so fucking clueless. Clueless, because we are not raising a generation of big thinkers and world-changers — we are raising a generation of drones. Sure, drones have their place in the world, but they can’t all be drones. In a post-literate, post-intellectual culture who will lead us in a leaderless world?
The 20th century gave us Einstein. The 21st has given us Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt. Sara Palin and Miley Cyrus. Glenn Beck. Give it up, Obama! It’s a lost cause.
Like a friend of mine wrote a while back, “we’ve been outnumbered for years.”
We’ve known for decades that our public schools don’t work. Parenting is a lost art. And now our colleges are sliding down the tubes. General education courses are becoming extinct. Students arrive on campus without an original thought in their heads and unable, for the most part, to write a coherent sentence. And with all of the old school academics retiring and no one equal to the task, many of those core courses are being pawned off on grad students who, themselves, don’t have the ability to write a coherent sentence and couldn’t find an original thought with a map. I fear the dumbness is taking over.
I once had high hopes for my niece. Now, I’m just hoping she doesn’t get knocked-up before she gets out of high school. Anyway, rant over.
