we're in another wave of our babies vs the babies of singapore in a standardized test duel to the death. i cannot believe that twenty years later they are still thinking and talking like this. look one problem is that your kid might end up like tom friedman: a collage of buzzwords without a mind in his profoundly unpretty, hideously swollen head. i've done this so many times for so long that i can't even pause to make the goddamn arguments anymore. your picture of childhood is sick. it is abusive, enslaving. your picture of education is grotesquely false: there is no distinction on your position between knowledge and sheer idiocy. i actually have to try to teach the little mechanical minds that now emerge from american public education: all they want is to be told what to do: they want a guide to writing the essay sentence by sentence, including the actual opinions. (there are exceptions still, thank god.)
i have no idea why, but your whole thing is built on wacky economic nationalism: friedman is always like: wait til you don't understand the accent of your chinese boss. it might as well be: you don't want to be ruled by negroes or women, do you? if negroes or women do well, then 'we' do badly. if immigrants do well, then 'americans' do badly. it is the same argument, or the attempt is to pit us against them in order to drive your other agendae: your technocratic/surveillance/dependency state, e.g. the idea is that if the finns do well economically, then we do badly. you don't even understand your own capitalism. bizarrely, friedmans actually oppose globalization, or they oppose it insofar it doesn't have the current form: a world economic hierarchy with america at the top. or maybe that's just the rhetorical strategy (threaten you with the notion that foreigners are getting uppity or getting to be better than you, so you'll accept 24 hours a day of mechanical learning labor for your children), in which case we needn't worry about it at all. if friedman is coming to study your school in singapore, you obviously should not let him in: the whole program is he wants to steal your ideas in order to beat you: it's a zero-sum game for friedman, and the whole program is to keep all the money flowing toward here, and keep it from flowing there. if you took their jive seriously, it'd be like going to study the red army, so we could eventually use their techniques to conquer china. the whole usa has devoted decades to doing nothing but improving test scores, and failed miserably. if they had succeeded, however, that would be meaningless. i hope y'all think about your own children this way: little capitalist engines competing with chinese kids: think of them as mere instruments to be devoted to the use of the american economy and the american state. and i hope your children eventually grow large and clear enough to beat you down like the pinheaded wretches you are.
once again: if you conceive children as little economic units whose job is to drive forward the society's wealth by generating their own, then compulsory k-12 education violates child labor laws. it violates laws on the books and constitutional amendments against slavery, to which it subordinates the weakest and most vulnerable people in our society. it removes them from their families in order to serve the state and the corporation, like missionary schools kidnapping indian children. how else are they ever to become productive members of american society? i. mean. this. stuff. literally.
i often hear it wondered: if there was something happening now like slavery in, say, the 1820s, would i recognize it as evil? would i try to do anything about it? or would i just think it's the way things are and listen to the authoritative voices of senators or newspaper editors that are telling me that it has to be this way, because of the nature of the people we are enslaving, or because of the economic necessities, the very viability of the american economy? well here is such a something.
this war between the children of america and the children of finland has gone on long enough, and i propose a final resolution, so that friedman isn't back with the same column in 2023: let's, in the traditional manner, boldly put the issue on single combat. we of america will select our champion rambo kindergartner; the finns select theirs. they can square off with machetes, maybe. whoever wins gets all the world's money.
