It’s tough out there for a pimp.

Now, that’s a good thing; isn’t it? Maybe it’s just my years in law enforcement, but I thought it was a positive aspect for society if pimps weren’t having a banner year.

I say that because last year’s Oscar winning song was It’s Tough Out There for a Pimp, from the movie Hustle and Flow, an uplifting story of a young pimp’s desire to be a rap star. The Academy Award winning song has certainly changed since Moon River.

The reason I bring this up is I recently gave away certificates and prizes at the Science Fair hosted at Mesa College, and it occurred to me how special these young people are since so many of their kindred are more interested in being pimps and thugs as opposed to doctors and scientists. I supposed it’s partially for this reason that Senator Penry has offered an education bill, which would require extended classes in math and science to receive a diploma.

This has predictably enough led to a great deal of flapping about by various school districts saying that they just don’t have the budget or the class time to accomplish this outlandish task.

What are they doing instead, one might ask. A prior School District 51 superintendent used to carry a list of things that he was required to do by the federal and state governments to receive funding. It was quite extensive and few items had anything to do with the basics of learning, such as reading, mathematics or how to express oneself like you have a command of more than 37 words of English.

If this bill is passed and signed by the governor, even in watered-down form, it will result in even more calls for higher financing for public education, despite the fact that adding Amendment 23 to our state constitution with its mandated increases has the capacity to bankrupt the state.

The connection between money spent on a per-pupil basis and results is largely discredited, as should other mythos such as class size being related to performance. A perusal of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which myself and some colleagues looked at recently, shows that class sizes were larger in the 1960s and standardized testing was returning better results. The answer to this, by the teachers’ unions, is to change the tests so we can’t possibly make those comparisons.

We are in serious danger of becoming a nation of the dumb and dumber. Probably at no time is history has so great a portion of the population had absolutely no clue as to how things operate around it.

I know in the Dark Ages, people were not particularly well educated, but they at least understood how some things worked. They knew what a plow was, pretty much how a horse operated and how to make a sword so that you could hack at your enemies.

We have a society where many people can’t even set their digital wristwatches much less know how they operate. The technology of the world mystifies a majority of the population and the direction that the educational process is taking us is to make students less aware of how things operate so the knowledge of the world is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Or heads in this case.

It has been said that the meek shall inherit the earth. While that may happen, it seems difficult to imagine given the head start the stupid have on them. If we don’t take control over our educational institutions and turn out some kids who know something besides how to put a condom on a cucumber or wear their hats on the side of their heads, we are going to be in trouble when we are in those nursing homes. If this is the generation that will care for this one, we better hope that robot thing gets going fast.

The idea that history inexorably moves forward is a fallacy. It seldom has. It goes forward and lurches back depending on the choices made.

During the Dark Ages, a hundred years might pass and not a lot seemed to change. As a matter of fact, society went retrograde. I don’t mean like retro fashions; I mean more like cars to horses kind of retrograde. People lived around things that they no longer could create. Prior to the Renaissance, people worked, lived and stared slack-jawed at architecture that they didn’t know how to build.

The domed buildings in Rome were incapable of being understood structurally by the Italians living in them. The secret of how to harden cement in water to build bridges was lost and people rode idly by aqueducts they couldn’t duplicate. So the idea that the march of progress is always forward is not borne out by history. But then who knows history anymore? Youths’ fascination with life styles with no productivity related to them whatsoever is alarming; more so because they discourage them from developing a skill set that’s going to be of use to anyone.

We may not necessarily find ourselves in another Dark Age, but we could certainly find ourselves in a Dimly Lit Age. Progress in society does not happen on its own. It has to be pushed by the people. We seem to have given up by requiring so little of the next generation.

Standards in public schools related to basic skills, not sexual trivia, cultural identification, or tours of alternate life styles, have to be required by parents and tax payers. If it takes bills like Senator Penry’s to get started, then everyone should be on board.

Originally appearing in the Grand Junction Free Press