One of the reading comprehension skills teachers know to touch on is the distinction between fact and fiction. There is another, little known, perhaps more important, skill that we should be aware of in this era of media-government partership. That is, the ability to distinguish news from nursery rhymes. This may be a critical piece of knowledge for baby boomers who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons, and may still be half asleep in their jammies while they are looking at TV.
The government regularly entertains us with an update of the American myth, which is that any common fool can grow up to be president or at least a high public official. This press release, for example, informs us:
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today announced the new regulations for Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The final regulations further the president’s goal that no child—including each and every one of America’s many students with disabilities—is left behind. By aligning the regulations with the No Child Left Behind Act, there is a new focus on ensuring that students with disabilities are held to high expectations.
The public should be glad that a better day is coming, and that our federal government is seeing to it. We can rest easily in the knowledge that by the year 2014, the year of The Rapture, all of the inequity caused by public education will be resolved. Furthermore we should anticipate wondrous outcomes brought on by the elimination of what the president called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” We will accomplish this goal by reciting slogans such as “Students with disabilities can meet high standards, as long as we adults have high expectations and hold them to these standards.”
There will, no doubt, be additional good news coming out of the Enlightenment in 2014. We might also marvel at the music of cats with fiddles, and the sight of cows jumping over the moon.
Thanks to Education Wonks for the tip.
2 Comments
I love your comparison between nursery rhymes and news. Let’s not forget that some nursery rhymes seek to instill hope in an impossible future.
Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html
Nursery rhymes often made a political statement. They also put children to sleep at night. In this case, the use of noble-sounding rhetoric is meant to persuade us that students with disabilities – and their teachers – should be measured by the same yardstick as the general population, which renders the concept of disability meaningless. This is both a political statement and a framing of the concept of equity that is absurd. Nonsense shouldn’t be the basis for education policy, but maybe we’ve fallen asleep…It might make sense if you don’t think about it.
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