{"id":16714,"date":"2010-12-26T06:00:33","date_gmt":"2010-12-26T12:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=16714"},"modified":"2010-12-26T06:24:09","modified_gmt":"2010-12-26T12:24:09","slug":"it-takes-a-village-or-a-parent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=16714","title":{"rendered":"It Takes a Village…or…a Parent"},"content":{"rendered":"

More and more young people are failing physically and academically. Who’s to blame and whatever shall we do?<\/p>\n

It’s been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military’s physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hmm. Can they vote?<\/p>\n

The nonprofit Education Trust released a first-ever report this week showing that more than one in five young people don’t meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nonprofit? Nothing against the Education Trust<\/a>, but that means benevolent, non-partisan and unbiased, right?<\/p>\n

Among minority candidates the ineligibility rates are higher: 29 percent. In Minnesota, the disparity for black applicants was even more startling: 40 percent were found to be ineligible. Among Hispanics in Minnesota the rate was 20 percent, but among whites, it was 14.1 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who’s to blame? How can we fix this? Can we commission a bureaucracy and empower it with generous funding to tackle this issue or might there be a way to skip all that and draw a self-serving conclusion via a first-ever report and save the trouble?<\/p>\n

This is more a distressing indictment of the U.S. education system than it is a testament to today’s Cheeto-eating, Xbox-playing youth, say the authors of the report.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…ignore the Cheetos and the Xbox, folks. Those are what we call outlying data points…they lie outside our predetermined conclusion.<\/p>\n

It strips away that illusion that the military can be an easy landing ground for those not bound for college, and it suggests that national security is at stake.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whoa! What?! National Security?!!<\/p>\n

(!!!)<\/p>\n

Well then, by all means we must move forward will all due alacrity and resolve!<\/p>\n

By that of course I mean we must increase funding to education, create a National Department of Parenting, appoint Michelle Obama as its head, and tax the rich to pay for it for surely they are culpable for this.<\/p>\n

“Our schools have to be upping their game if we are going to supply the military with the kind of folks they are going to need 15 years in the future”<\/p>\n

“The welfare and security of our nation is one and the same as the welfare of our young people,” said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications for Education Trust.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thank you. Without this first-ever report in hand, we might have thought this alarming issue was a distressing indictment of American parents, who by their absence, abuse or worse yet, their apathy, have raised a generation of fat, dumb kids.<\/p>\n

It’s good to know they’re off the hook and our wiser, more educated overseers are eager to absorb yet another personal responsibility.<\/p>\n

Today a grateful nation (or about 50% of it) commends you for your tireless service in the interest of an ever growing and burdensome federal government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More and more young people are failing physically and academically. Who’s to blame and whatever shall we do? It’s been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military’s physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb. Hmm. Can they vote? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16714"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16750,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16714\/revisions\/16750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}