Schools, technology and practical solutions

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

I recently subscribed to an online Netflix account. It is $7.99 per month. With this and Internet access, say $50 per month, or less than $60 a month total, you can have all the serious history, geography and literature documentaries you want.

In fact, for these subjects, I’ll suspect there is not a high school in the United States which could teach them better than they can be taught here.

Add to this, or completely substitute it with the KhanAcademy (http://www.khanacademy.org) and I’ll defy you to find any school system in the United States that will get a young person through the equivalent of high school in better shape. By the way, KhanAcademy is free and has over 4,000 courses, all online.

With this prescription, if allowed, one could put a person through grades 1 through 12 for about $6,500 total.

You have to be hiding under a rock to not be aware of the gun control controversy going on in the United States today. Of course, gun control would not have and will not stop any of the mass killings we have seen in recent times.

Further, a student in a community college near Dallas just recently blew the whole argument out of the water with an alleged attack with, of all things, an X-Acto knife and a scalpel.

Just how many “rounds” does the “magazine” of an X-Acto knife hold? Well, it must be at least 14, since he managed to stab 14 people before he was subdued. (I assume that would be Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette’s answer, anyway).

The real solution is obvious: Identify and control those with troubled minds.

So, what is the common thread between schools and guns? It is quite simple – popular and political solutions to problems, real and imagined in these areas, have absolutely no relationship to reality.

Why?

There are two reasons, I think. One is folks simply can’t get their brains around creative solutions. The other is that politicians and other groups have strong vested interests to guard.

There is a strong political contingent, for instance, that apparently will not be happy until all private firearms are banned in the United States. Whether they feel this way out of fear and ignorance, or whether they have a more sinister motive remains to be seen.

However, they are going to use any excuse to keep chipping away at firearm ownership until they win. It is inevitable.

And, inevitably, they will win, unless we can break the back of the ever-creeping forward (or is it backward?) progressive socialist movement.

Likewise, with schools.

With the proposal I have made above, we don’t need teachers, we need a few IT specialists to keep the computers online, a couple of guards, a recess referee and a couple of high school coaches.

The costs of education will go down, way down. But does this serve the objectives of teachers’ unions or even colleges and universities that teach teachers? Of course not, and they are a powerful political block.

Yet, the truth is, with technology, we have arrived at a place where we don’t need as many teachers – at least in the traditional sense.

Will any school district embrace this idea? I seriously doubt it, regardless of how logical and effective the outcome can be.

We will know this country has gotten serious when it starts proposing logical solutions to straightforward problems. Until then, columnists like me can be assured of a job!

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.