Making Oklahoma Great Again (2) --school is not for everybody

Not all Oklahoma children should have a K-12 education.

To make Oklahoma great again, by building a wall around us to keep out undesirable people and ideas, the first step must be the  elimination of the current education system, K-12.

The current system is largely a failure because it's based on the false philosophy that all children should go to school, that everyone has a right to education.

Public education is a wasteful socialist plot that drains Oklahoma of greatness and insures mediocrity.

A recent headline in The Oklahoman newspaper proved this point when it showed Oklahoma is falling behind because it doesn't have enough skilled workers. It's obvious from that article's facts that there is only one reason for education in Oklahoma--providing skilled workers.

Public education is a wasteful socialist plot 

To accomplish that goal to insure Oklahoma Greatness, all "public" schooling will cease at grade four. Every child must be taught how to read and write, and basic math. That can easily be accomplished in four years of eight-hour schools days lasting 12 months  a year, instead of the wasteful nine-month system now. Those students incapable of this training will be deported, along with their parents, as hindrances to Oklahoma Greatness.

At that stage, all children will be tested for aptitude in various work skills, plus science and math and playing football. Most average and lower intelligent children will then be housed in work-skill specific boarding schools to learn those basic lower level work skills necessary to make Oklahoma Great Again. They'll thus be prepared for other needed skills--such as clerks, painters, farm and ranch hands, oil field workers, receptionists, call-center workers, computer  repair, cops, firemen, plumbers, prison guards, teacher aides and nurses.

This can be easily accomplished in just four more years of school, by going 12 months a year. Thus by the eighth grade, they'll be active producers in Making Oklahoma Great Again, instead of essentially living off taxpayer-financed welfare as users instead of producers.

Those worthy of math, science and football, will continue with a highly restricted curriculum in preparation for going to college.

 Getting rid of the wasteful "liberal" education

Oklahoma's Greatness also requires a revolution in curriculum eliminating wasteful useless courses, obviously called a "liberal" education.

• All foreign languages will never be taught again. All people need to speak American only.  Language police will enforce this requirement strictly, because American language is essential for greatness.
• All arts and music will be eliminated. These add nothing to building skilled workers.
• No more humanities will be taught for the same reason, and they teach "critical" thinking, since there is nothing in Great Oklahoma to be critical of and  we don't need people who think, but only who have essential job skills.
• History classes will only cover those subjects that show how Great Oklahoma is, to foster pride and commitment to Making Oklahoma Great Again. For instance, students will learn  about the "Trail of Opportunities," that our Indian citizens undertook to prepare this state for us later immigrants who chose this Oklahoma as a God-given right.
• Science will also concentrate only on petroleum geology and related engineering and math fields. Fictional false science theories such as evolution and climate change are excluded. This will be basic preparation for doctors, lawyers, CEOs, petroleum scientists and other essential Oklahoma Greatness producing careers.

Students will all have digital locator microchips inserted in their wrists at the end of grade four, or at birth, to insure that they remain in Oklahoma after completion of the state's investment int heir educations. Students will also start each day with the pledge of allegiance to the flag, reciting the Ten Commandments and singing "Oklahoma."

Obvious exemptions will be the children of the actual producers of Great Oklahoma, those who have earned the resources to send their children to private schools. To encourage this, they will also be given tax breaks so they can be better producers, offsetting those who are only users.

Two thirds of teachers will not be necessary

With the reduced curriculum, at least two thirds of the teachers will not be necessary. There will also be no need for teacher training for the next 30 years at least, as all teachers over 30 will be recycled into language police, prison guards, wall gate guards, Walmart greeters and others at a savings of thousands of tax dollars. Other articles in The Oklahoman reported Gov. Mary Fallin discussing a crisis in the shortage of math and science teachers. This will be easily solved by eliminating all those other wasteful courses and teachers and by reducing the number of students who advance beyond fourth grade.

Those students who advance into the restricted curriculum, the Boosting Success program, also referred to as "BS," will specialize in science, math, or producing national chamtionship football teams.

This program of making Oklahoma Great Again and advanced technology for remote education also means millions of savings in closing at a vast majority of the current wasteful system of 500 school districts by allowing one district per county, as well as eliminating most educational administrators' positions. Most administrators will be recycled as minimum wage curriculum builders, because of their experience in making to-do lists for others.

All teachers and administrators who are to be "recycled" may apply to teach other essential classes, or be retrained for basic skills. If they refuse, they will be deported outside the Making Oklahoma Great Wall as hindrances to Making Oklahoma Great Again.

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Next in  Making Oklahoma Great Again will be the recycling and restricting of the public university curriculum and system to concentrate on necessary math, science and football. This will require turning all the other wasteful public colleges and universities into prisons, proving more jobs for the recycled education administrators.

(Satire, with appreciation to The Oklahoman, Gov. Mary Fallin and Aldous Huxley.)

Forbidden art from long ago

Death--8" by 10" pencil sketch by Terrence Miller Clark, probably in early high school years at Comanche, Oklahoma

I recently found this collection of my Dad's artwork. But there's more here than a high school student's artist work, probably done in class when he should have been studying. His main topic was WWI., which was fresh in everyone's memory when he was growing up in the 1920s  and early 30s in red dirt Oklahoma.

I learned recently that my dad would not have been able to draw like this in current public schools.   Why?

We were recently having a kitchen sink installed, and I was talking to the 30-something fellow doing the work. I expect that he was conservative, perhaps an evangelical, but we were having a great conversation and he had definite, well-defined opinions on lots of stuff. He told me that he and his wife were home-schooling their children. They live in the Putnam City district. He said they sent their son to first grade, and then pulled him out, for a number of reasons. One reason was that the boy was not allowed to draw pictures, in art class, of any weapons. "Boys draw pictures of swords, knights, fighting," he said. "Nothing wrong with that."

I thought of these pictures of my Dad's. I related this story to a professor colleague of mine who also home-schools her children. She wasn't surprised. She said in Edmond, art classes forced the children to "color inside the lines."

My Dad never colored inside the lines. when I was in first grade, I never did either, and got graded down in later grades for wasting my time drawing pictures of U-boats, and dogfights between Mustangs and Me-109s from WWII. Too often, mine showed the Germans winning, and that didn't sit well in the 1950s.

My Dad and I would never have graduated. All my children got good educations in public schools, in Waurika and Stillwater. But creativity was allowed.
And it still should be. Not politically correct test-oriented rote learning. Oklahoma and America need creativity more than ever, and that means letting students explore, and try, and fail, and if they want to draw pictures of people fighting, let them.We don't need cookie cutter; we need individuals.

So these photos, and the ones following, all 8 x 10 on fragile, yellowing paper and Big-Chief tablet paper, are forbidden today.