Educated, eh? 2.1: Charleston skools dun stiruk us a homer agin…

So it would seem that Charleston finally has a claim to fame in the world of education. Its Academic Magnet High School recently made the list of top ten high schools in the nation. Granted, everything else in the Charleston educational system is near the bottom, but why quibble. Homer Simpson once said “You can use statistics to prove anything- 63% of all Americans know that.”
Naturally, as soon as a school is noticed for being successful, the powers that be will immediately seek to marginalize any gain. To wit, the issue now before the school board is that the admissions requirements must be changed to fit those of other county schools- a lottery will decide who goes and who does not.

Good work, folks. You finally have a system that works (if you want to go to a school that stress academics, you must be academically adept)- therefore, it must be dismantled. Sure, there is the usual hand-wringing about “fair” and “opportunity.” Hmm. Would you let a child into the Charleston school for the Performing Arts as a piano studies candidate if they could not successfully identify a piano by sight? Would you let said student into the Math/Science honors program if their answer to every equation was “science doesn’t prove anything, only god does”?

Redistribution is not the answer to all of society’s ills- real or imagined. If Charleston wants to teach students that it does not matter how hard they try, and allow random chance to be the deciding factor in a quality education, I will gladly continue to pay my son’s tuition at his private school.

Bottom line: Rewarding effort, ambition, and intelligence is (ostensibly) what this nation’s value structure requires. Opening the floodgates to random chance for the sake of some esoteric understanding of the term “equality” leads to exactly what the current philosophy behind public education so richly deserves: another generation of brain-dead leeches whose only ambition is to own a better cell phone than the person behind them in line at McDonald’s.