Senior year...twelfth grade. A unique school year that can be filled with a plethora of meaningful choices: classes that supply needed high school credits or diverse electives, opportunities to earn college credits, and important seasoning and maturity-building that takes most adolescents up to or across the milestone 18th birthday. Why has this staple of K-12 education suddenly come under attack from Utah's GOP Senator Chris Buttars?
[bullshit on]
Buttars asserts that Utah's budget deficit of $700m would be positively impacted by canceling the last year of high school. His supporters cite "senior-itis", "goofing off" and an amorphous reference to "being done in the junior year" as sufficient to take this educational and social staple away from Utah's children. The $60m savings generated by this deletion - which would account for less that 10% of the budget gap - apparently solves the budget problem. Yay! I
love when a less-than-10% solution magically becomes a 100% solution! That's, like, so freakin' awesome...now
there's some math I can get behind. Reminds me of how 41 is more than 59...
[bullshit off]
But I digress. Here's the
real reason Chris Buttars and his educational death panel want to kill senior year: to increase ignorance in Utah's general constituency. No other reason.
Denying access to education is the quickest route to ensuring that people are controllable, tractable, and will believe whatever you tell them. Increasing a group's ignorance positively correlates to the amount of influence and control a governing body can maintain over that group.
Is the problem "senior year"?
No. If programs aren't building enough practical value into the senior year, fix the problem by building more value into the senior year! Duh. If students don't need senior year because they have enough credits to graduate, then let them graduate early! Duh. If students don't need an academic senior year because they're fully enrolled in a vocational program, then let them do the whole class day at the vocational facility instead of busing back and forth for the half-day! Duh. If students ready to work part-time while finishing a few necessary credits, let them go to school half-day and work part-time! Duh.
Republican representatives tend to offer the same tired, predictable, and inefficient solutions to every problem. Children and senior citizens are ALWAYS the first to get screwed over in a budget crunch. Not only should the GOP Stepford-drone Buttars not be allowed to further damage Utah's educational policy, he should be censured and punished for suggesting it. Educational programs need to be
strengthened, not weakened: additional academic rigor, increased opportunity to earn college credits, and additional preparedness for life and career after high school are vitally important to the strength and success of our society but receive little attention or support because of funding.
We, as a nation, seem to pull the 180 degree U-turn so much more than necessary lately, and so many of these disgraceful U-turns originate within the Republican (or, Republican't) party. Maybe Utah's legislators could offer to work for free for a few years; that would positively impact the budget wouldn't it? Worried that legislators "working for free" would get you exactly what you paid for...nothing? Well, seems to me that Utah's getting a whole lot of "nothing" from the well-paid Buttars already...