A Back to Basics education with 24 students in one room, and a teacher salary of $240,000. This is great. It would entail a meaningful pay cut for me, but I'd do it in a New York minute for the joy and challenge of it. Can I say whatever I want, and can I use my whip?
I have always claimed that John Adams and Abe Lincoln got better educations than our public school kids get. Of course, they were not the average kids - and you don't "get" an education anyway - you "take" one. Or not.
It is no longer PC to acknowledge that relatively few are able, interested, motivated, or inspired to engage in a serious classical education. For good reason, too: it's not practical and it's difficult, and most jobs do not require calculus or music theory. Result? Watered-down non-rigorous gruel and As and degrees for all, accompanied by a dose of leftist propaganda and multicultural BS. And that's OK, because you cannot get wisdom in school (except maybe a basis for historical wisdom, but that's easy to do on your own once your Mom teaches you to read).
Now back to do the bidding of She Who Must Be Obeyed in the gardens. Adding "organic material," ie our recent truckload of slightly aged manure (a sweetly odoriferous and oozing mountain in the back driveway) from my dairy farmer pal, to the new perennial beds. I will have to dig it in, 2' deep. I will dump some on top of my vegetable garden too, as mulch to be dug in next Spring. Then horseplay later, if it doesn't rain: I could use a sherry or two for courage and a vintage stogie this afternoon, followed by a good gallop over hill and dale with the Mrs. to let today's cool Yankee wind clear my head of the nonsense in life. If rain, maybe indoor horseplay with the same goal.
Editor note: Photo is an early 1800s one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT
