Choice's chances: Tax-funded schools without strings attached? by Greg Swann "Charter schools are small businesses in the education business. They have the same problems--cash flow, contracts--that small businesses run into." So says Leo Condos, attorney for the ATOP Academy College Preparatory School in Phoenix. But ATOP has a problem that most small businesses _don't_ run into: State oversight. In addition to the normal problems of small business--overdue rent and unpaid bills--ATOP has not complied with the financial reporting requirements imposed upon all Arizona charter schools. It is this failure, and not any ordinary small business problems, that may result in the school being shut down later this month. Some would regard this as a blessing: The school has played fast and loose with state requirements since its charter was approved. Some would regard it as a curse: ATOP serves a minority population that the education establishment politely refers to as being 'at risk'. Either way, the school faces a peril that could never confront a private school nor any private business. A business might be closed by its owners and it might be foreclosed upon by its creditors, but it wouldn't have to answer to a state board of overseers. Ironically, a public school, no matter how horribly mismanaged, would also never face ATOP's fate. But ATOP is the exception, charter defenders would insist, and this is true. Arizona has more than 300 charter schools, with many more in the pipeline. The overwhelming majority of them are solvent and fully-compliant with the for-now minimal state regulations, and a few of them are among the very best academic schools in the state. Arizona has the best charter school laws in the United States, fiercely defended by the Center for Market Based Education, a spin-off of the Goldwater Institute, and more than half of all U.S. charter schools are in Arizona. But consider this: In this session of the Arizona State Legislature, legislation was introduced that would have crippled and ultimately killed charter schools as a for-profit alternative to public schooling. The legislation failed, but it is hard to imagine that the public education monopoly and the teacher's unions will give up and go away. What is worse, the only truly private schools left in Arizona are parochial schools and the price-restrictive redoubts of the very wealthy. The evidence of experience argues that those who oppose parental choice in education will nibble away at the charter schools, one niggling regulation at a time. In due course, the charters will either be outlawed or absorbed into the public school system or they will be so compromised by regulation as to make no difference. Charter schools, tax-credits, vouchers, tax-abated savings accounts, it all comes down to the same thing: If the state has the power to withhold the funding, the state has the power to dictate the curriculum. Presidential candidate Gary Baeur has actually floated the idea of vouchers for homeschoolers, which would destroy the very last refuge of free--meaning unchained--education. In the accompanying article, Llewellyn Rockwell demonstrates how horribly compromised is the purportedly parents' choice voucher program recently signed into law by Florida Governor Jeb Bush. This was all foreseen in horrifying detail by Richard Mitchell, the Cassandra of American education. Parents' choice paid for by anything other that parents' money emerging directly from parents' pockets is a fool's paradise in the long run. The tax-funded education apparatus is expert at only one thing: Co-opting and corrupting and destroying and devouring all opposition to itself. State-funded education is ruled by its own invisible hand, one possessed of an anti-Midas touch: Everything it touches eventually turns to dross. All that charters and vouchers will do is destroy the private schools, every one of them that touches the state's money. So what is left for guerrilla schoolers? Pam Probst, writing for the Separation of School and State Alliance, has a number of good suggestions for long-term political action. But in pursuit of your own children's education, you are left with the alternatives you've always had: homeschooling, private schools or the public schools. It's possible you can sneak your children through the charter schools, if you are lucky enough to live where the laws are still relatively reasonable, but that rug can be pulled out from under you at any time, and it is certain that it eventually _will_ be pulled out. Perhaps surprisingly, the public schools _can_ provide a rigorous education for your children. This is often true in very wealthy communities, but it can also be true in middle class districts. It is a cynical truth that the education monopoly will fight reform by any dirty, underhanded trick it can think of. One of its cutest tricks is to create so-called magnet schools, public schools that actually provide a serious, rigorous academic education. The realpolitik purpose of these schools is twofold: First, they ghettoize all those troublesome parents (and teachers) who demand schooling from the schools. And second, they raise the standardized testing scores for the entire district without changing anything anywhere else. It's important to understand that these magnet schools will not last either. They are a sop--a bribe--calculated to siphon off combatants from the main battle, the battle against charters and vouchers and other pesky reforms. Once those foes are well and truly vanquished, the magnet schools will be absorbed back into the mire. This is as it must be so long as there is any such thing as tax-funded education. But taking account the guerrilla's tactical objective--the pursuit of the best possible education for your children now--a magnet school may be your optimum choice. Voucher, smoucher (February 1981) by Richard Mitchell There is very little to be gained and much to be lost in assuring, through education voucher schemes or tuition tax credits, that the public school system will become entirely what it is now only partly--the last, futile hope of the permanently dispossessed and disabled. We say this with testy reluctance, and certainly _not,_ as regular readers will know, because we can see any hope that the jargon-besotted and uneducated tribes of educationists and teacher-trainers will ever provide the land with literate and thoughtful citizens, but because there is no chance at all that credits or vouchers would destroy or even mitigate the government schools, which have proven again and again that they can easily digest and transform into nourishment any complaint brought against them. As the better and luckier students--and teachers--escape, our cunning educationists will have no trouble persuading the same old agencies and legislatures that they now need even _more_ money. But the voucher and credit schemes probably _will_ destroy the worth of the private schools. To see why, we must consider some popular, widely preached misunderstandings: "The public schools could provide better education if we gave them more money." This is false. We give them far too much money. They spend it on gimmicks and gadgets and programs and proposals and whole legions of apparatchiks and uneducated busybodies and Ladies Bountiful manquées. The private schools just don't have that kind of money. That's why they're often so much better. If we were to enrich the private schools, most of them would hire the recently disemployed values clarification facilitators and start offering courses in environmental awareness enhancement and creative expression of self-as-individual-self through collage. In a few years, we would have thousands of private schools just as bad as the public schools are now. Furthermore, bad private schools, unlike bad public schools, can do as they damn well please just as long as they can find buyers for what they choose to sell, and they will care no more for our opinions, or yours, than the mongers of obscene T-shirts care about our quaint canons of taste. The people who run the government schools can at least be ridiculed and humiliated in public. All of that must be seen in the darkness cast by another popular misunderstanding: "Parents should be free to choose for their children whatever kind of education they think best." This is _not_ false, for it asserts only a special case of that right to the pursuit of happiness to which we are supposed to be committed. It is, however, irrelevant and (perhaps) unintentionally cynical, for it presumes the possibility of "free choice" in countless millions of innocent citizens who have themselves been "educated" by the life-adjustment slogan-mongers, and who have come to "think" that a good education is an indoctrination in _their_ pet notions and beliefs rather than someone else's. Their choices of schools for their children will be no more the fruit of informed and thoughtful discretion than their choices of deodorants and designer jeans. The support they might withdraw, through vouchers or credits, from one pack of fools and charlatans they would fork over to another of the same, which, furthermore, will usually be an ad hoc reconstitution of the first pack, now happily embarked on what is for them just one more obviously profitable, bold, innovative thrust. We can understand the angry desperation out of which even thoughtful citizens can propose, as remedy for the ills caused by one governmental contraption, yet another governmental contraption. And any system for credits will be exactly that, a wholly owned subsidiary of the state and a bureaucratic agency for the propagation of ideology and the enforcement of "standards." And the standards will be devised not by the enthusiasts of vouchers, who don't really know exactly what they want anyway, but by the same old coalition of educationists and unionists and politicians and social engineers and manufacturers of gimmicks and publishers of pseudo-books, who _do_ know exactly what they want, and exactly how to get it. It is simply naive to imagine that our government, or any government anywhere, will construe tax credits or vouchers as a way of letting its citizens keep, and spend as they please, some of their own money. Such devices will be thought of as "subsidies," and loftily denounced, especially by those whose livelihoods depend entirely on perpetual subsidization of the public schools, their pandemic problems, and their Byzantine and costly governance, as "handouts" of "public" money. Should credits or vouchers be provided by law, the same law would have to provide, as _quid pro quo_ to a tremendous and noisy lobby of government employees, that most of the policies and practices that make the private schools what they are would suddenly become illegal. When private schools are required to hire certified graduates of state teacher academies, and to offer all the mandated mickeymousery of social adjustment disguised as "studies," and to make sure that the ninth-grade textbook for Appreciation of Alternative Lifestyles doesn't use any tenth-grade vocabulary words, then the erstwhile voucherites will long for the good old days, when you could at least get what you paid for, and when the private schools actually _were_ an alternative to government education. Those voucher and credit schemes were probably _not_ cooked up by a conspiracy of educationists. Those people aren't that smart. But you just can't beat them for luck. The silencing of the lambs... Exhibit one Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss. Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake. Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take. Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged. Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took. Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. Juliet: You kiss by the book. Exhibit two For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister's ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken; and it is hoped they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select passages, they may choose to give their sisters in this way will be much better relished and understood from their having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect abridgments; which if they be fortunately so done as to prove delightful to any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational). I have a wish, and it may well be peevish and irrational. You decide. Exhibit one is from _Romeo and Juliet_. I love that passage because it is so thrillingly loving, but I love it also because Shakespeare betrays so much respect for the _minds_ of his young lovers. And they are _very_ young. Juliet is thirteen, and yet she walks her full half of this metaphorical pilgrimage of love. But, the stock rejoinder runs, "Romeo and Juliet" is fiction. _Real_ children aren't like that. Aren't they? Exhibit two is from "Tales from Shakespeare", which was first published in 1806 by Charles and Mary Lamb. It's tough sledding, so it may help for me to tell you that the topic of that ponderous 250 word sentence is: Easy reading. "Tales from Shakespeare" is the prototype of all the dumbed-down books that infest school libraries; it was the first of its kind. And what is charming about it is that the Lambs produced this book not because children of ten or thirteen lacked the ability to read Shakespeare in the original, but because their fathers might not permit young ladies early exposure to the unexpurgated, unbowdlerized, un-dumbed-down, raw, naked poetry. Shakespeare is brilliant on every ground, it goes without saying. Entirely too much without saying. We revere him without saying precisely why we do, and the breach he is more honor'd in is his own. Well, once more unto that. The ground that I would most honor him on is here: He wrote in English. What?! Isn't that the chief complaint against Shakespeare, that his language, while it might be lyrical, is anything _but_ English? True enough, Elizabethan English takes some getting used to, and the poet is deliberately not making things easy. But at a time when virtually all works of the mind, all across Europe, were being done in Latin, Shakespeare and a few other Renaissance pioneers dared to write poetry in their own native tongues. And of those brave experimenters, Shakespeare was the most brilliantly successful. By his success should we be schooled. Do you understand? We have schools where eighty or ninety or ninety-five percent of the inmates emerge unschooled, with no hope whatever of unpacking the meaning from the Lambs, much less from Shakespeare. Of the few bright children who escape from our schools able to read and to reason at _some_ 'level of literacy', _very_ few are able to think and to write _in English._ They cannot "find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing." Instead, they are 'educated', and they can only locate lingual appendages emerging paradoxically from arboreal organisms, recover learning materials inexplicably miscatalogued in limited-flow watercourse environments, audit faith-based oral presentations emanating by undocumented means from mineral compounds and investigate an hypothesized and possibly apochryphal propensity for persistent pandemic praiseworthiness. Words without end, amen. Who is more ignorant, the child who cannot read English, or the childish adult who cannot write it? The lambs are silenced and the sheep say only nothing... The point is this, my wish, my prayer: I wish that children in school today were educated to the same high standards that were being used in the England of the Lambs. "Romeo and Juliet" is fiction, but real children _are_ that clever, if they are schooled. The works of Shakespeare, unexpurgated, unbowdlerized, un-dumbed-down, are very fine texts for such a schooling. --Greg Swann _Shakespeare in Love_ and children We live by the belief that children have no idea what is too onerous, too burdensome, too insufferably heavy for their fragile mental frames. In truth, they can bear far more that we might give them credit for. Our home is well-laden with Shakespeare, and we don't tell the children that his plays are difficult even for adults. They like the action and the humor, and they don't know that they're bearing the greater weight of Western civilization on their frail shoulders. Like Hamlet with Gertrude, father to his mother, sometimes parents must be cruel to be kind. The movie _Shakespeare in Love_ is a kind way to begin a Shakespearean conspiracy of cruelty. The film is very fun, very funny, bright and sprightly and never dull. It is fairly consistently bawdy, but never tawdry, and as with the Bard himself every bit of this will slide right past your children. There are three brief scenes where you might want to cover younger children's eyes, but that's all. In compensation, your children will get an incomparable Shakespeare-made-easy introduction to the beauty and majesty of some of the greatest poetry ever written. The play within the movie is _Romeo and Juliet,_ and vast tracts of it are lovingly and compellingly performed. As with Shakespeare's own works, the 'groundlings' are never ignored, so younger youngsters will absorb the high art patiently while waiting for the low comedy of the subplots. _Shakespeare in Love_ is a fine introduction to Shakespeare by enacting and mirroring one of the great tragedies. But it is also a fine introduction to Shakespeare by being made very much in the antic spirit of the romantic comedies. Not a dull moment on the screen, not a squirm or a fidget in the audience, not a dry eye in the house at the end. The next phase in the conspiracy is to lay on more and better at once. Older children will immerse themselves in the Franco Zeffirelli _Romeo and Juliet._ Younger ones might be happier with his _Taming of the Shrew,_ the world's only action-adventure chick flick. _Hamlet_ is popular here, both the two-hour Zeffirelli and the four-hour Kenneth Branagh extravaganza. Branagh's _Henry V_ is a martial feast for young warriors, and his _Much Ado About Nothing_ and Trevor Nunn's _Twelfth Night_ are both joyous romantic comedies. Some recent films--such as the Ian McKellan _Richard III_--are not appropriate for younger children, but there is a great wealth of older films in the classics section of the video store, including works by Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. And then there is Shakespeare in performance, more thrilling if less spectacular. Plays are sometimes hard to find, but smaller theater companies all over the world present Shakespeare frequently. Better yet, perform the plays yourself at home. You can find the complete works of Shakespeare fairly cheaply if you shop around, either in printed form or on CD-ROM. You can find the plays for free on-line. And we are fond of Leon Garfield's _Shakespeare Stories_ books. Garfield renders the major plays as short stories, retaining much of the original dialogue. They're lavishly illustrated and fun for children to read or to have read to them. One day not too far from now your children will be confronted by a dusty, fusty, crabbed and cranky professor of 'litchracha' who will do everything he can to wring every last bit of life out of Shakespeare and of every great artist of the Western canon. By a cruel conspiracy of kindness, you can inoculate your children from this foul creature, giving them a love for poetry and for art that can never be wrested away. _Shakespeare in Love_ is a very good way to begin. --GSS In Avondale, all Cloud, no water... Exhibit one Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. Exhibit two Agua Fria Union High School Grade Reading Math Language 9 44 56 43 10 42 49 47 11 45 50 42 We can't decide if we are curators or prosecutors, but we are certainly acrawl with exhibits. Exhibit one is a reading test, among other things. It's Emerson, from _Self-Reliance_; it was written in a time and place when self-reliance meant something. Exhibit two is a set of Stanford 9 test scores. Exhibit three is a letter to the editor of the _Arizona Republic_ from a Mr. Don Cloud, _papio sphinx._ And we must be prosecutors, for a crime is taking place, and we have taken it upon ourselves to investigate it. The crime? Innocent high school students are being robbed of an education. The place? Agua Fria Union High School in Avondale, AZ, where there is no cold water, no hot water, no water at all. The perpetrator? Person or persons unknown, although we have been able to identify their ringleader: The selfsame Mr. Cloud, himself neither hot nor cold but very, very dry. Mr. Cloud is false in all particulars, of course, but as with the pitiable battered batterers we can say this for him in mitigation: He has done nothing that was not done to him first. This must be so, for he is so obtuse as to _boast_ that his young charges are thrillingly close to the top of the bottom half of the bell curve. Marvel at their mediocrity! Marvel at his! His two is no real two and his four looks suspiciously like a seven. His every word chagrins us utterly and we are too much mortified for him. And this is cruel, in a sense, since he is surely no less endearing than grandma's third-cousin from the old country--charming and enthusiastic and proudly befuddled. Perhaps he'll press a quarter into our hand when he thinks no one is looking. Then he'll say something absurd in fractured English and we will assume that gentlest asinine expression and help him find his way home. But there is a difference: Grandma's befuddled cousin isn't being paid to lead the children of Avondale out of the desert of ignorance to the cool water of reason. We are not elitists--to the contrary--but we are snobs. It is too much to expect that a genuine intellectual would volunteer to run a high school. The job is given to shop teachers and guidance counselors for the very good reason that their peculiar talents, unlike those of a cultivated mind, would not be wasted. But it is surely reasonable to expect that a high school principal, no matter how befuddled his career path, should rise to the challenge of his position. How can we expect anyone in Avondale Union High School to learn to reason when reason is so well lost on its purported champion? Does Mr. Cloud actually believe that, were he "battling a serious illness", he would want his physician to "preach teamwork and consensus"? Who's to say that a _medical_ solution is necessary at all? There's a nurse down the hall who swears by homeopathy and her brother-in-law has great faith in faith-healers. Shouldn't we have a group discussion and put it to a vote? Mr. Cloud might find himself moved to a place hotter than Avondale, but at least he wouldn't have been victimized by that awful competitive self-reliance. And this is too easy. Mr. Cloud is false in _every_ particular. There is not one line of his letter that is not a deceit, and a moronically discomposed deceit at that. But the big lie, even bigger than that whopper about running at the same speed, is this one: Avondale taxpayers angry that their children have been robbed of an education should "want the best to come together to work together to find a cure." That is: "Don't blame me. I'm only the man in charge." It would be a wonderful thing if Mr. Cloud were to find work he can do. It wouldn't make any difference in Avondale; his successor would be another baboon, probably a worse one. But at least Mr. Cloud could experience the pride of craftsmanship, of producing instead of despoiling, of creating instead of destroying, of doing good instead of endless, boundless, exponentiated harm. One prison-uniform after another, one asinine expression just like the next. One cut of face and figure. Teamwork and consensus, the unminded goring the skulls of the innocent. This is no work for a decent man. And we know that some of Mr. Cloud's young innocents are giggling at this. And we know that even the best among them are stumbling over the hard parts; it's a reading test, after all, among other things. From this distance we can't point those students to a sure path out of the desert of ignorance, but it seems likely that 'Self-Reliance'--the essay and the state of mind--is a fairly accurate map. On their way out of Avondale, if they are very kind, they might help Mr. Cloud find his way home... Exhibit three As the principal of Agua Fria High School, I am proud to state that for the past three years, Agua Fria's Stanford 9 scores have been among the best in the West Valley. However, using the Stanford 9 to compare one school to another reveals nothing about the culture of the school. The score tells the public nothing about the morale of students, teachers and other employees. It does not speak to the school's mission. Most realize that all students don't run at the same speed. Why do we expect them to learn at the same speed? Stanford 9 tests promote competition. Why do we want schools and students to compete in the academic arena in an era when we preach teamwork and consensus? If one were battling a serious illness, I doubt whether he or she would want the doctors or hospitals to compete to see who could cure the patient. Rather, the patient would want the best to come together to work together to find a cure. - Don Cloud, Principal, Agua Fria High School, Avondale The silencing of the censors... > From: "Greg Swann" > To: "Don Cloud" > CC: "Arizona Education Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan" , > "Arizona Education Association" , > "Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull" , > "Arizona Parents for Traditional Education" , > "Barry Young - KFYI" , > "Bev Medlyn/The Arizona Republic" , > "Bob Mohan - KFYI" , > "Bobbie Jo Buel - AZ Daily Star" , > "David Berliner - Dean ASU College of Education" , > "Doug MacEachern/The Arizona Republic" , > "Ed Walsh - KFYI" , > "Jennifer Dokes/The Arizona Republic" , > "Jeremy Voas - New Times" , > "John Taylor - Dean UA College of Education" , > "Ken Western/The Arizona Republic" , > "Lattie Coor - President ASU" , > "Marianne Moody Jennings - ASU/Arizona Republic" , > "Marianne Moody Jennings - ASU/Arizona Republic" , > "Michael Limon - Tucson Citizen" , > "Patricia Biggs/The Arizona Republic" , > "Peter Likins - President UA" , > "Stephen Auslander - AZ Daily Star" , > "~Greg Swann - Corresponding Secretary" , > "Mary Gifford" , > "Lew Rockwell" , > "Harry Browne" , > "The Separation of School and State Alliance" , > "Education Writers of America" , > "Center for Educational Reform" , > "Bob Grey" , > "Mike Williams" , > "Rich Lemanski" , > "Dr. James Howard" , > "Alfredo H. Luna" , > "John Schmadeke" , > "Norma Pina" > BCC: > Subject: Guerrilla Schooling #2: The silencing of the censors... > Date: Sun, Aug 8, 1999, 6:05 AM But, soft! Even now there is a new issue of Guerrilla Schooling, a web-based magazine concerned with practical strategies for wresting a rigorous academic education for our children from an education establishment stoutly committed to doing everything _but_ providing rigorous academic education. We are guerrillas, not reformers, and what we seek is a _real_ education, not any of the many unreasonable, unreasoning facsimiles. For _our_ children, not all children everywhere. _Now,_ while they're still children. This much is shorn from "The silencing of the lambs" in the new issue: [....] Shakespeare is brilliant on every ground, it goes without saying. Entirely too much without saying. We revere him without saying precisely why we do, and the breach he is more honor'd in is his own. Well, once more unto that. The ground that I would most honor him on is here: He wrote in English. What?! Isn't that the chief complaint against Shakespeare, that his language, while it might be lyrical, is anything _but_ English? True enough, Elizabethan English takes some getting used to, and the poet is deliberately not making things easy. But at a time when virtually all works of the mind, all across Europe, were being done in Latin, Shakespeare and a few other Renaissance pioneers dared to write poetry in their own native tongues. And of those brave experimenters, Shakespeare was the most brilliantly successful. By his success should we be schooled. Do you understand? We have schools where eighty or ninety or ninety-five percent of the inmates emerge unschooled, with no hope whatever of unpacking the meaning from the Lambs, much less from Shakespeare. Of the few bright children who escape from our schools able to read and to reason at _some_ 'level of literacy', _very_ few are able to think and to write _in English._ They cannot "find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing." Instead, they are 'educated', and they can only locate lingual appendages emerging paradoxically from arboreal organisms, recover learning materials inexplicably miscatalogued in limited-flow watercourse environments, audit faith-based oral presentations emanating by undocumented means from mineral compounds and investigate an hypothesized and possibly apochryphal propensity for persistent pandemic praiseworthiness. Words without end, amen. Who is more ignorant, the child who cannot read English, or the childish adult who cannot write it? The lambs are silenced and the sheep say only nothing... [....] What more do we need to say? The words speak for themselves: http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/ Even so, we do go on. For one thing, we dump a little cold water on the idea of tax-funded parents' choice. Be assured, though, that we did not get the cold water from Agua Fria Union High School, whence Principal Don Cloud is honored as our honorary baboon. And, of course, we rhapsodize about Mr. Shakespeare, plotting out a guerrilla strategy to grace _your_ children's minds, if no others, with his art. For the benefit of Mr. Cloud, we'll repeat this from our first web-page update notice: If you should someday find your name in the 'To:' line, take heart. It's a rare honor, and you can only claim it by taking and failing to earn tax-dollars for the work of the mind. And you can always strive to do better in the future, although we won't be reserving any breaths awaiting that outcome. If you're in the 'CC:' line, it's because you are presumed to have an interest in education. Fair warning: Being in the 'CC:' line will not keep you out of the "To:' line. The guerrillas are in the 'BCC:' line, the line you can't see. If you think we are laughing at you, you could be as much as half right. It were well for us to quarry that pile of prose for the soul of wit, because we'll be saying it over and over again. As time permits. For now, Mr. Cloud should anticipate hearing from a few parents. And we expect he will also overhear the half-stifled titterings of his wittier charges. Laughter may not be the best medicine, but it is the guerrilla's best weapon. This is why it is so often banned. Which brings us to this: Satire is legal in the United States. We heard from someone called J. Z. Al-Huriyeh (jzah@bellsouth.net), who characterizes last week's send-up of Mr. Morris Feller as a "libelous vendetta". This is untrue on both counts, of course, but it does not matter. We have the right to speak freely. In a public posting, Al-Huriyeh claimed that we had plagiarized someone, we can't imagine who. This is all so much hot air, except that Al-Huriyeh copied his email to our ISP, asking them to shut us down. He also expressed the hope that Mr. Feller would sue us. Such a suit would lose, of course, but the purpose of this sort of thing is to silence debate, to throttle speech rather than to refute it. But: Our heart is pure and therefore we have the strength of, well, several, anyway. We do not scare. But Al-Huriyeh also asks that we cease posting to the Usenet group k12.chat.teacher, the hole in the veldt from which he hides from life. This much we are gracious enough to do. We do not wish to impose where we are unwanted, and we never voluntarily associate with barstool Napoleons, tin-pot Torquemadas or other would-be supervisors of every mind but their own. Instead we shall turn--this once, anyway--to humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare, where the turn of mind turns always to turning the earth of the mind, the truest act of cultivation. Dig we must. That's enough. Links and email addresses if you have them. Forward and reprint as you like, except as noted on the site. Raise hell, make waves, rock the boat--but look out for your own. Until next time, Greg Swann gswann@presenceofmind.net http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/