Enrollment in educator preparation programs is down, and student apathy is up. Education is at a precipice. Thus, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, I have spent many minutes constructing my own modest proposal:
We will begin by eating the books.
The hearty tomes—Shakespeare, Milton, Homer—will be ground into fine pastes that will then be scooped into troughs and fed to the kindergartners.
The banned books will be charred, with extra care given to the texts that feature unflattering portraits of America the Great. Those texts will be burnt to crisps and then dusted over a feast of textbooks.
We will not under any circumstances read these books.
Books for reading, after all, serve no purpose in our modern learning facilities. They expose children to questionable ideas regarding equality and diversity. Diversity of thought is antithetical to our national pride.
We will, of course, remove free and reduced-price lunches, as the government should not subsidize lunch for anyone. If the children are hungry, then let the children eat the books.
Math, arts, sciences, and all the nerd topics will be summarily forgotten. All that nonsense is a bridge to nowhere. We will keep the calculators, though, in the event we need to calculate taxes.
School buildings, those monuments to societal greed and excess, will be repurposed as Second Amendment centers dedicated to protecting the rights and freedoms of true Americans. Upon penalty of imprisonment, we will strongly recommend all children—from the babies in wombs to the sixth-year seniors—participate in Guns First education, which will involve the following curriculum:
- The Gun and Your Baby: How to Sing Pew Pew to Your Womb
- Toddlers and Triggers: If They Have Knees, They Can Squeeze (the Trigger)
- Preschool Is for Pocket Pistols
- Middle School Militia: Protecting the Only Amendment That Matters
- Heavy Artillery for the High School Patriot: Why You Should Carry—and If Your Teacher Doesn’t, Are They Really an American?
Teachers will be retrained. They will learn to be thankful, first of all, for the privilege of monitoring America’s youth. They will do so with a joyful spirit and no backtalk, thank you. Teachers will be women, naturally, because nurturing is a woman’s job.
The men who are currently teachers will monitor the Middle School Militia program and offer apologetic smiles occasionally when they ask for help with the copier. They will also receive the choice bits of paper chips to boost morale. This will encourage masculinity; peak masculinity equals peak social performance.
The women teachers will earn every bit of their pay, and the salary will start at zero. They will be paid for positive performance review only. Performance reviews will come from students, who will judge the teachers based on their enthusiasm and willingness to entertain a class better than any social media. Parents can award additional points for teachers who spend weekends thinking of and working for their children.
School buses will be repurposed as teacher housing units. Teachers will receive a max annual salary of $10 and six oranges, one for each time they hear “orange you glad you became a teacher.” There will be no shared units for families on the buses, and thus teachers will need to take a vow of chastity. Their job will be their baby, as it should be. These housing units will have cameras so that the public can have unfettered access to their tax dollars at work.
Children who are disrespectful will be sent to kindness gardens, where they will learn to recognize diversity as weakness and conformity as strength. The family-friendly “The Buttercream Gang” film, powerful in its obscurity, will be incorporated into every disrespectful child’s IEP (that is, their “In Every Child, a Patriot” program). Should this plan not curb the disrespect, children will write one thousand lines about the dangers of woke culture, the single greatest threat to democracy today.
As we are creating Americans and not sensitive pansies, we will also bring back paddling—but with a twist. If a child misbehaves, the parent will be paddled alongside their children. This will help create cohesiveness in the family unit.
Additionally, parents must attend seminars for “how to send a student to school and not the being you peeled from your couch over the weekend.” Said parents will have earnings withheld for each seminar they do not complete.
We will get rid of administrators. We will instead require the former admins to begin each day reciting their “why” in Latin. They will be stripped of their former titles and will instead become grief counselors—this counseling, of course, will come in the form of discouraging educators from bringing emotion into their jobs. If the shaming does not work, we will bring forth paddling.
With respect to the community at large, we will eliminate compulsory local taxes that support the bloated school system. Instead, taxpayers will have the luxury of sending their dollars to the winningest professional football team. These dollars represent the goodwill of the taxpayers and will not be returned to them, unless in the form of vouchers. These vouchers can only be used at University of Phoenix for Kids.
Instead of school-based team sports, we will institute sponsored spectacles where parents can come berate teachers. There, parents will receive tax credits for the best insults. Teachers will not be allowed to respond, as they are to be muzzled to prevent indoctrination. Teachers will be required to attend these public flagellations as a part of their contracts.
Of course, we will need doctors and lawyers and traveling knives salesmen. Thus, grades 9-12 will be reserved for the high-achieving students. We will limit these positions to eight per state.
Because no one wants to work anymore, students earning below a B will be placed immediately in the workforce doing the jobs that no one wants to do. Their dismal pay will only be matched by the disrespect, but if they did not want to be there, they should have taken advantage of their free public education.
Or they should have eaten better books.
