Educators and Idiots

Education is a complex business. It's complex because, to run a school district, a superintendent (CEO) or school board member (corporate board member) must know how to manage people, budgets, priorities, politics, bureaucracies and a community often at odds with itself in terms of needs, desires and purpose.

So it's fun to hear about people interested in running local or state school districts who clearly have not had their meds properly balanced. Like the genius who wants students to learn to stop bullets with textbooks. Or school boards that want to put religion in, and not worry about the intricacies of church and state – or basic literacy as an important part of the learning experience. The latter helped found an amazing new religion, based on the same sane, solid principles as that of Intelligent Design: please read their dogma or join.

In real life, people with sane, common sense give suggestions to leaders. In our wonderful Amerikan world, people with about as much sense as rutabaga make pronouncements in the hoped they are better liked.

We would be best served by asking future politicos -- and especially school board members and superintendents -- to prove their sanity.