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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (April 22, 1999)
Death’s door Americans struggle to understand why people kill MARK BALDRIDGE is a senior English major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist I was bom, I never thought I that I would die. But I might die. - Cowboy X I have already seen my own death, embedded between lightning flashes on a stormy West Texas night many years ago; dressed just like me and walking, like me, through the intermittent dark ness, headed home. I looked up and there he was, walk ing away. The lightning which had etched his image on my retina flashed again and he was gone - that’s how I knew it was death, my death. An old German fairy tale tells of the Doppelganger - the double - and when you see it, it foretells death. I expect to see it again, soon enough, recognizing it as I recognize myself. But foretelling death is easy: wait a second and I’ll foretell yours, too. It is coming, you know. In the face of this undeniable fact, it’s sort of strange the reactions, the relationship, you might say, we have to death. Let me give a few examples: In moratorium The Nebraska State Legislature is currently considering a two-year mora torium on executions of condemned criminals. This is to give the Legislature time to study how the death penalty is applied. Some particularly brutal - and even multiple - murders committed in Nebraska do not end with the perpetra tor being sentenced to death: Do differ ences in defendants’ race, income and intelligence effect sentencing? It seems obvious that the penalty is unevenly applied. Concerned senators like Ernie Chambers and Kermit Brashear want to know: Can we make the sentencing of killers more equitable? But Sen. Gene Tyson objects: “There is nothing unusual about putting people to death.” Give it to me straight, Doc For Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the man responsible for easing at least 130 ter minally ill patients into the afterlife, there is certainly nothing unusual about it. Dr. Death was recently sentenced to 25 years (at his age - he’ll turn 71, in May - this amounts to life in prison) for the murder of a terminally ill man. In the late 1980s Kevorkian built a machine that helped people commit suicide by giving them a narcotic fol lowed by a lethal dose of potassium chloride. Since then, using a number of baroque techniques, he has gone about his grisly task in the face of lawsuits, criminal charges, numerous court dates and a veritable shit-storm of pub lic opinion - guided always by the sim ple premise that people have the right to avoid a lingering, miserable death with a little help from their friends. Boys in black On Tuesday a group of bright but eccentric social outcasts entered their Littleton, Colo., high school with homemade bombs strapped to their chests and shotguns and high-powered pistols hidden under long black dusters. They wore masks and laughed and joked with the kids they shot in the head and the chest and the leg, killing 15 and wounding many more before turning their weapons on themselves. News of this inexplicable and trag ic event knocked the equally inexplica ble and tragic Yugoslavian war off front pages nationwide, while CNN spent countless rotations and consulted God knows how many clergymen in a desperate attempt to make sense of it Please stand up Who is responsible for all this death? Hollywood? Some inane rocker with a David Bowie complex and cosmetic contact lenses? The television media will be the first to point the finger at, you guessed it, television. But the truth lies elsewhere. The truth is, we die too easily, we are too fragile. Death is a simple act, the simplest. No matter how much wheezing and straining goes on in the last minutes, death settles over us like a blanket. Our anger, our grief and fear, our pain are too easily resolved in death, whether our own or someone else’s. Knowing this, that human life can be extinguished something like flipping a light switch, makes the temptation to go ahead and flip that switch so much stronger. Our hatred, our rage, the blood lust in our veins, our sense of wrongs suffered, of righteous indignation ... F in education U.S. government is failing our children JESSICA FLANAGAIN is a senior English and philosophy major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist The public school system in the United States is failing to teach America’s children basic reading skills. The public school system in the United States is failing to equip America’s children with satisfactory knowledge of history. The public school system in the United States is failing to provide America’s children with basic math and science skills. What the United States public school system is doing is grossly misusing money and energy. Public schools are beginning to act suspi ciously like surrogate parents. The system has deduced that parents aren’t doing their job adequately and has decided to take that responsibili ty off their hands. As a result, the act of actual edu cation has been lost. Kids aren’t skilled in reading, writing and arith metic. My introduction to the struggles of public education came this year when I enrolled in Educational Psychology 450. Do you know what I’ve learned? That many children who are educated in public school simply cannot read. And it would seem that instead of returning to the basics of traditional education, more time and money are being used to categorize students into academic inability groups. You want an example? Well, they label them LD (learning disabled), ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit and hyper activity disorder), BD (behavioral disorder) and any other prefix-D label you can imagine. But you know, it strikes me that perhaps the real problem is not the children. In 1994, only 30 percent of fourth graders tested as proficient in reading skills, and 40 percent of fourth graders failed to demonstrate even basic reading skills. The Hudson Policy Bulletin reported that 30 percent of high school seniors do. not even test as basic readers. Maybe, just maybe, it is not that these children are incapable of learn ing to read. Maybe it’s not that all our kids suffer from some disability. Maybe the system is failing. Could it be? Tell me it’s not so. Now the government’s answer is to spend, spend, spend. Send the teachers to little workshops so they will be up to date on the latest teach ing methods, educational break throughs, whatever. Hire some more researchers to go into classrooms and psychoanalyze the kids. When they’re done, they can go to the teacher’s lounge and ascertain why little Johnny doesn’t pay attention during his social studies lesson. nmm, aoes ne suner from low self-esteem, an unidentified strain of | EFGD (Educated by the | Federal Government 1 Disorder) or is it possible that a 7-year-old boy has ants in his pants? You tell me. Maybe I’ll tell you. For a modest administra tion fee, of course. The federal govern ment is buying out schools. Or local schools are selling out to the feder al government, however you want to see it. The elementary ana Secondary Education Act was passed in 1965. This act is now funded at $11 billion annually and has predictably grown into a mass of red tape. It now totals close to 1000 pages. The educational elite continue to press forward in spending, implementing more and more experimental pro grams that are geared more toward social engi neering and less toward educating. ! These programs sys tematically sabotage the very idea of academic excellence by de emphasizing education al achievement and emphasizing politically correct attitudinal stan dards that do not even correlate with acade mics. They turn teachers into “facili tators,” and students into study par ticipants. Programs and acts that evidence these ineffective practices include School-to-Work, Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, Improving America’s Schools Act, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The truth about all of this is that as more and more federal dollars are pumped into the school systems, and teachers become facilitators for political cor rectness j|j|f with each new program, education has become a muddled swamp of social mandates. It’s these mandates, and not the improvement of actual education, that are sucking up the money. Steven Sample, president of the University of Southern California, was quoted as saying, “We have dis mantled the family in America in a way that no other industrial society has, so now we want our schools to be surrogate \ sr**’ •A ..V l* 'm 4 k .... JB.-^ . ": * ^ ,-, ; " .— . . ?Tz -ft,.-'-? V >&*■ f>7- --'3? i - • kl&SPi families, physicians, priests and par ents. We want them to be the agents of social change. So the schools can not do their job of teaching English and mathematics.” The federal government doesn’t think parents are doing their jobs. So now schools are teaching kids about sex, because they think parents won’t. Schools are devoted to improving the self-esteem of stu dents, because they think parents don’t do a good enough job. Schools and teachers are trying to raise chil dren to be socially responsible citi zens, because they think parents couldn ’t possibly do as good of a job as they would. Don’t believe me? Our neighbor ing state of Kansas’ mission for their Department of Education now reads: The mission of Kansas is to prepare each person with the living, learning and working skills and values neces sary for caring, productive and fill filling participation in our evolving, global society. RED ALERT! RED ALERT! Do you want a government agency teaching your kids values? Do you want the government telling your kids how to live a fulfilling life? No. The function of schools is to edu cate, not to reform, not to be the front-line defense for all of soci ety’s ills, from unwanted pregnancy to religious ais affection, from racism to child abuse. Schools shouldn’t teach kids how to develop self esteem, they shouldn’t teach them how to treat others, they shouldn’t teach them how to have responsible sex, or how to be politically correct. And the government shouldn’t fund self-esteem, social dulls, sexual aware ness or political correctness. Schools are charged with turning out students who can read, write, apply practical and hasic mathematical principles, remember enough history to under stand the work! around them and think for them selves. Why don’t we over haul this trend of wasteful and ineffec tive educational1^ bureaucracy? Here’s a novel idea: Let’s teach our students hew to read.