Johnny Can't Read. But Abe Could.

I can almost imagine it. Thomas and Nancy Lincoln organize a protest at the Hardin County town square, in their small Kentucky town. Their beef? Simple: their son, Abraham, can't read, he can't write and he can scarecely do his arithmetic. You see, Tom and Nancy are protesting because it's the schools' fault. The city's, too. And if there were a Department of Education in 1818, it would be at fault, as well.

Of course, this isn't the way it actually went down. Nancy died young, and Tom was left to raise young Abe as a single parent (a term that wouldn't slither its way into the English lexicon for another 150 years). By all accounts he was a disengaged parent, and too ill-educated to help his son with his school work.

There were no books in the Lincoln household, and there is no record of the Lincolns having subscribed to any newspapers or magazines. None of their friends is reputed to have belonged to country clubs, or to have attended Harvard. Way back when, there was no teachers union in Hardin County to scream "won't someone think about THE CHILDREN?" as it bargained for its next contract, and there were no standardized tests to measure one child's retention of useless information versus that of another. Oh, and there was no school lunch plan.

And still....almost twelve score years ago, our forefathers were able to bring forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the propostion that all men are created equal. And this young nation of boundless natural resources but limited finances, brought forth the likes of Abraham Linoln.

Fast forward to today and ask "what have we wrought?"

This author hosted a dinner party recently, and among the guests was a Chicago Public School teacher. This teacher recounted stories which shocked all in attendance (except perhaps the one guest who was himself a CPS graduate).

On a recent day, as this teacher was finishing her class work, three children (the youngest was 13) were shot to death about a block away in an attack that involved at least one assault rifle.

Her school is also rife with gang activity in which blacks and hispanics war each other like sunni and shiite. Apparently bloods and crips belonged to a more gentle time.

There are four armed policemen in the school at all times. During one recent fire alarm, four enrolled youths (one hesitates to call them "students," or even "kids") actually jumped an armed police officer. No one was killed, thankfully, though one can imagine the recriminations against the CPD if one of those innocent darlings had been harmed.

And recently, an enrolled youth told this same teacher (during class), "shut the fuck up, why are you fucking talking to me?" The teacher "wrote the incident up," but her confidence that nothing would be done was apparently well-placed, because nothing was. The school has bigger problems to worry about, or so goes the popular thinking.

Does it?

A student yells at a teacher, using profanty, disrupting a classroom, and there are bigger problems? Seems to me it all starts with thugs like that.

The annual budget for the Chicago Public Schools is approximately $4.5 billion. It could be $1 trillion, and this writer would sooner home-school a child than send him or her to the Chicago Public School Distict. And therein lies the conundrum: Almost 200 years ago, this nation could turn out a student like Abraham Lincoln. A man who changed the world for the better, and who started out with nothing more than a thirst to learn.

He had no money, no support network, no school counselors getting involved (or not, as the case may often be). But still, he had a thirst to learn.

The problem of our failing schools and the expensive machines of governement that enable them cannot be solved until we stop believing that the answer is to throw ever-increasing amounts of money at these ungrateful degenerates. Of course, I'm talking about the adminstration of the school district and its sick bureaucracy.

The youths just need to feel the hide of a belt.