Stump Lane

Image: KitchenEmporium.com

HERE’S Retired Vice Adm. J.D. Williams, speaking on behalf of Mission: Readiness:

…an estimated 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 cannot join the military. There are several major disqualifying factors, such as being overweight or having a criminal record. But Williams says another major problem is lack of proper education.

“In Maine, 21 percent of high school students do not graduate on time, and without a high school diploma, it is virtually impossible to enlist,” he said. “Even among our state’s high school graduates, 19 percent seeking to enlist, cannot join for the low scores on the military’s basic exam for math, literacy and problem solving.”

Williams joined retired Maj. Gen. Thomas D. Kinley of Cape Elizabeth in calling for state, local and federal policy makers to support an expansion of early childhood education programs, such as Head Start. Kinley cited a Michigan study that found that students who attended preschool programs were three times as likely to be at a basic level of achievement or higher at age 14, and were 44 percent more likely to graduate from high school. [MPBN]

Your Montag is parent to two precious Test Scores himself. And, especially at this time of year, I have to wonder if we’re doing right by them sending them back into the prison system most people like to call “school” or “education.” OK, okay, I’m sorry! It’s more of a disciplinary sorting machine to get the little slabs of Test Scores flowing down the appropriate tubes.

But this. THIS. The Portland, Maine school superintendent wants to implement universal preschool for national security purposes.

Reducing young people to numbers and percentages — BMI ratios, graduation rates and AFQT scores — like we’re tracking Six Sigma process outputs, isn’t just humiliation towards conformity with societal norms, it’s a means of dehumanization. Just as the enemy must be dehumanized in war so that soldiers can dispassionately destroy them and the public at home can commend them for doing so, so must our own fighters be thought of as something other than breathing human beings.

Between the sheer turpitude of “education” as the manufacture of inhuman killing machines [added for emphasis: from the age of 4! –ed] and the perverse rationalizing of the R2P crowd (see George Jones and IOZ) it’s kind of amazing people aren’t just constantly fucking puking in the streets from the stress of coping with the violence and depravity of US culture.