A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

For the Improvement of the Public School System;

Together with a Solution to the Economic Difficulties

Incident to Doing Away with Illegal Immigration;

And an Inducement to Responsible Parenting

by

Isaac Bickerstaff, Jr.

It is a melancholy reality of contemporary American society that the halls of our public schools swarm with children who, sharp, smart, and quick witted though they are by nature, resist the educational pap proffered by their teachers in response to No Child Left Behind, Climb to the Top, the Great Educational Leap Forward, and all other such schemes to improve the educational system. And so the children grow up to hate learning, and end up ignorant of the most elementary facts of life.  Failing in the diligent application of repeated drilling to have their students learn which circle to fill in the Scantron forms of standardized exams, teachers find themselves frustrated into leaving the teaching profession and, incapable of any other kind of work, must either flip hamburgers at their local McDonalds, their livelihood supplemented by public funds for health and welfare, or leave their native country in order to find employment for themselves teaching English in a foreign land, thus becoming a drain either on the economy or on the population of the United States.  Used to the solicitous attention of desperate adults, moreover, the children themselves grow up to become a drag on the economy as they expect public funds to support a life made frivolous by willful ignorance and indolent by the largesse of the public coffer.

I think it is agreed by all parties, that the prodigious number of children who do not learn has a common characteristic.  They are the litter of indigent parents who are themselves the product of a failed educational system, and whose income from honest labor never rises above mere poverty.  From dishonest endeavors, such as theft, robbery, or the selling of illicit drugs, the parents can often derive a larger income, but to the degree that they come by such funds illegitimately, to the same degree they misuse the money on frivolity and dissipation, advantaging themselves and their offspring not at all.  A dismaying consequence of this way of life is that there is no one to take the low paying jobs that would go a-begging in this country were it not for the flood of illegal immigrants who, willing to work for next to nothing and to make a living from their pittance, make a mockery of our national boundaries and of the security system that in theory protects us all.

I am certain that whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and
 easy method of making the children of the indigent sound and useful members of
 the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.  My goal, however, is not just to find useful employment for such children, but also to solve the economic problem entailed by stopping the entrance of the many million illegal immigrants into the country, and in performing both of those services, also to serve as an encouragement to parents to attend to their primary job of ensuring the welfare of their children.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that it become the policy of this nation that any child born to parents who earn under the national median for household incomes be sent to school only to his or her tenth year of life, after which all such children should enter the labor force at a level of pay half of what is now provided to illegal immigrants, lesser amounts of course offered to female children.  In the four years of schooling that these children would acquire, moreover, I propose that they receive a practical education.  Some skill in reading is necessary so that the child can follow plain instructions; and by the same token some elementary computational skills are essential to determining how many fruit, at so many per box, have been picked in the course of a day's labor.  But schools should endeavor no further intellectual lessons beyond those basic accomplishments.  Instead, teachers should be charged with ensuring that children learn the discipline of hard work.  It is therefore essential that the schools provide children with exercise in picking fruit and vegetables as well as in the mechanism of spinning cotton and wool and of sewing and darning.  Children should become accustomed to the heft of pickaxes and to the exercises essential to mowing lawns, folding clothes, picking up trash, and so many of the other essential tasks of life.

With such useful accomplishments in their skill sets, and without the molly coddling of officious teachers intent on teaching them what is too dull to learn, the children would be ready for the workplace.  Furthermore, the effects of physical training on the health and prowess of the children cannot be underestimated.  With such training, at age ten I would expect a hearty young boy to be an adequate substitute for the illegal laborer, strong enough to lift without much difficulty a fifty pound bag of potatoes fresh from the field in Idaho, or a bushel of apples straight from the orchard in Washington State.  Similarly, I expect a young girl to be adept at all of the household chores now undertaken by foreign and illegal nannies.

A very worthy friend of mine, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my scheme.  He suggested that insofar as illegal immigrants have recently served as objects of entertainment for hunters along our national borders, it would be possible to reserve some children, trained for two years beyond their tenth, to serve as human prey to substitute for the illegal immigrants whom the nation would no longer need.  It is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice, (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, but I protest that a twelve-year old's being able to range freely through the deserts of the southwest is so signal a privilege and pleasure that it outweighs whatever shadow of cruelty there might be in his being hunted, shot, and mounted for display.

Having responded to the only credible argument against deporting all illegal immigrants and sealing our borders against further incursions by such immigrants—I mean the economic argument succinctly represented by the question, "Who else would do the work?"—I further propose that the Federal Government make better use of the funds now misspent in the effort to teach children how to fill in Scantron forms.  The nation must redirect those funds to the project of policing our borders, building walls, searching out tunnels, and establishing impregnable perimeters.  Such work is far worthier of national attention than the hopeless task of compelling children to learn standard answers to repetitive problems presented via insipid assignments intended to routinize responses on Scantron forms, and would suitably employ all those who under current circumstances become teachers and who, in the scheme thus proposed would no longer be required to perform that thankless task, or leave these shores for employment.

I think the advantages of the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.  First, it would lessen the need to prepare an army of teachers capable of doing nothing much beyond riding herd on rambunctious children.  Second, it would provide adequate and useful employment to a population of children who now are a mere drag on the national economy.  Third, it would nullify our dependence on foreign workers to do jobs that no one who has gone through our current educational system is willing to undertake.  Fourth, it would enable the nation to redirect its energies to the truly productive task of ensuring the security of our borders.  Equally important, moreover, is a fifth benefit, that it would encourage parents to work so as to raise their income above the national median, thus ensuring that their children will enjoy the new, more homogenous and intellectually challenging educational experience that the schools will provide.

I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the nation as the number of immigrants falls to near zero, and as the children die from overwork, malnutrition, and hunting.  This I freely own, and it was indeed one principal design in offering it to the world.  I desire the reader will observe, that I calculate my remedy for this one individual nation of America, and for no other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon Earth.  Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients to solve our educational conundrums:  of funding all schools at an equitable level so that the children of the poor are as well served as the children of the rich; of limiting the size of classes so that teachers in poor school districts do not have forty or fifty children per class; of providing aides to teachers in poor school districts where often the population of special needs students is nearly as large as the population of ordinary students; of offering students in poor school districts opportunities to go to museums and theaters, to travel to foreign countries, to engage in the cultural and social life of the nation; of giving students in poor school districts curricula that ask them to think beyond rote responses, and texts and tasks that engage them in real world experiences rather than in stories and problems constructed specifically to exercise the minimal skills tested in standardized tests.

Such visionary approaches to teaching are the detritus of past modes of education that are discarded on the ash heap of history.  Therefore let no person talk to me of these and the like expedients, until he has at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice once again.