Features > February 10, 2004

Education Eugenics

By Greg Palast

Go ahead, George, and lie to me. Lie to my dog. Lie to my sister. But don’t you ever lie to my kids.

Deep into your State of the Siege lecture, long after sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, you came after our children. “By passing the No Child Left Behind Act,” you said, “We are regularly testing every child … and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

You said it … and then that little tongue came out; that weird way you stick your tongue out between your lips like the little kid who knows he’s fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snakey tongue dart out and I thought, “He knows.”

And what you know, Mr. Bush, is this: You’ve ordered this testing to hunt down, identify and target for destruction the hopes of millions of children you find too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.

You know and I know the testing is a con. There is no “better option” at the other end. The cash for education went to eliminate the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire’s son another million.

But, you’ll tell me, you took tests as a youth. I know you did. And you scored on the Air Guard flight test 25 out of 100, one point above too dumb to fly. But you zoomed past the other would-be flyboys. They were stamped, “Ready for ’Nam.”

And you took a test to get into Yale. And though your pet rock scored a wee bit higher than you, your grandpa on the Yale board provided the “better option” that got you in.

The ugly little irony is this: The core of No Child Left Behind is that struggling children will be left behind another year. And another year and another year.

You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program—because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: Identify the nation’s loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap.

No Child Left Behind is of one piece with the tax cuts for the rich, the energy laws for the insiders, the oil wars for the well-off. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.

And so we have No Child Left Behind—to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

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• Reader Comments

  Can it be any plainer than that?  The GOP rants about how the Dems are trying to start a class war by confronting these gaping holes in the Administration’s social policies.  The truth of the matter isn’t that the GOP are against a class war, it’s that they don’t want the Dems to get in their way.  They have done all they can with the rules corrently on the books to make money, now they want to take the next step - establish a feudal working class.  The more crime, desperation, and hopelessness we see in our poorest areas, the more justification they will have to impose draconian laws that will cement these conditions into our social fabric.  And a Kingdom was born…

  Posted by David Aquarius on Feb 10, 2004 at 4:19 PM

  I recently attended a preschool workshop where “No Child Left Behind” literature was passed out. I wondered why this was being handed out and many children in Alabama did not have textbooks! It there something wrong with this?

  Posted by Jean Scott on Feb 10, 2004 at 5:13 PM

  A BRAVE NEW WORLD?

  Posted by APRIL 26, 1992 on Feb 11, 2004 at 8:11 PM

  also, this administration wants to ‘leave no childs urine behind’.  Did you know you can garner someones complete DNA from a urine sample?  Did you know there is already a national DNA database for Americans?  Leave no child’s dna behind!

  DOWN WITH BUSH in ‘04!

  Posted by Jason on Feb 12, 2004 at 11:26 AM

  It scares the bejeepers out of me,there are still too many people
  in this country, who are Bush’s lovers....I know many of them, and
  I am not considered a person who
  has the right of free speech...that is
  how hard it is out here!!!

  Posted by Shirley Kittrell on Feb 12, 2004 at 12:00 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 14 posts.

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• Education Eugenics