As thoughts drift to Washington D.C. this weekend, I’m reminded of a conversation I had there while attending a National Science Foundation meeting. This was shortly after the rather memorable episode in which the new Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings – after only two days on the job – issued a stern warning letter because an 11 year old girl named Emma interviewed for a public television show was naive enough to tell an animated character named Buster Bunny about “my mom and Gillian, who I love a lot.”<\/p>\n
Silly sillly Emma. How could she not realize that the two grownups who had loved her and taken care of her all her life – including her own mommy – were part of an evil anti-American agenda? Even though this was just a passing remark made to an cartoon rabbit in a 30 minute TV special about making maple syrup and cheese in Vermont, the warning from the new Secretary of Education was enough to get the Public Broadcasting Service to pull the broadcast in most parts of the country.<\/p>\n
Think how effective something like this is: Now Emma knows to be ashamed of who she is, of the people she loves, of her very life and those she holds most precious. In a way it was quite brilliant and bold for our Education Secretary (now in her last<\/i> two days on the job) to use this little girl as a public example to hold up for shame and ridicule, as her very first official act. It sent a message to all little kids everywhere that they had better have the good sense to come from the right sort of family. And if they don’t, the little brats should be prepared for our government to turn them into figures of public shame in front of an entire nation.<\/p>\n
I would be surprised if the incoming Arne Duncan will be able to come up with anything so splendidly dramatic right off the bat. You’ve got to hand it to Secretary Spellings – she set the bar very high indeed.<\/p>\n
Anyway, back to my tale of visiting the NSF. At a reception before the meeting I got into a pleasant chat with two women. After a few minutes they mentioned that they both worked for the U.S. Department of Education. Ad libbing like a true New Yorker, I asked them how they liked the Secretary’s new education policy. “What policy?” they asked. “You know,” I continued, “Don’t learn, don’t teach.”<\/p>\n
At which point they both got very frightened looks on their faces, peered around furtively to see whether anybody had witnessed them talking to me, and quickly excused themselves.<\/p>\n
So much for New York humor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As thoughts drift to Washington D.C. this weekend, I’m reminded of a conversation I had there while attending a National Science Foundation meeting. This was shortly after the rather memorable episode in which the new Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings – after only two days on the job – issued a stern warning letter because … Continue reading “Don’t learn…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}