Times are hard! Gut the schools!

Hey, the financial picture looks bleak. How can we cut some fat out of the budget? I know: whack programs out of the schools!

They sure don't need crap like music and art. There's plenty of recorded music to entertain us in the few short years between now and the environmental destruction of the planet. Seriously: does anyone need much of an education when no one's really got a future anyway?

Interestingly, in a certain school district in Maine, not only is orchestra on the chopping block less than one year after they hired a highly qualified teacher to spiff up the program, but they're also planning to completely dismantle their technical school. Wait a minute. What happened to all that bullshit about math and science education, and educating our work force for the demands of the 21st Century?

Cutting technical programs seems like a none too subtle acknowledgment that our young people really do have nothing to look forward to. Cutting music and art is just gratuitous cruelty. Shove them toward their future with no skills and no aesthetics. How soon will it matter?

If you produce an ignorant enough generation, they won't even know they should complain. Even if they figure it out, they will have no ability to do so. So the system works!