Educational reform 101

Focus on Education

By Maria Babbage

All right class, pull out your pencils and a piece of paper — we’re going to do some quick math.
Now, I know you all had to learn your long division last week, but we’re going to scrap that for now. The provincial government has come up with this new math and we’ve got to learn it as a part of the brand new curriculum.

Okay, everybody grab a measuring stick. We’re going to find out how much wasted space we have in this school. I want each of you to go and measure a room — any room. It doesn’t matter what it’s used for.
Of course you can measure the cafeteria, Mikey. My, think of all that wasted space. You could fit at least four classrooms in there.

Now, I want you all to take your stick and measure 100 square feet around yourselves. Wait a minute — aren’t we supposed to learn the metric system? Oh well, never mind. Metric or Imperial, what does it matter?

If you find there’s no room for you here children, you’ll have to go somewhere else — see if you can find some space in the bathroom or something.

Good. We’ve had to move a couple of you in the broom closet, but on the whole, you’ve all done quite well class.

Now we’re going to do a little scientific experiment that will help us illustrate today’s lesson. This is going to be a little more complicated, so I want you to come up here, Davey Johnson, and help me with this. We’re going to do a dissection.

Yes I know Davey, it’s very exciting. Just calm down. Don’t worry, you’ll still have the most important job.
All right, now I want you to take this scalpel and cut out all the essential organs from this carcass we call an education. Good job.

Take out your textbooks class, we’re going to see if we can identify these little parasites. Oh wait — we haven’t gotten the new textbooks yet. Well, the province did promise to deliver them sometime soon.

Now class, take a good look. It says here that these little bloodsuckers are called communities. When they get together, they take control of where their tax money is going.

But as you all know, money is the lifeblood of the Harris government. We can’t let these little cancers take control of everything, now can we?

Watch closely at what a good job Davey’s doing, class. See? Once we cut them out, they’re really harmless. That’s what we want. Good.

Class dismissed.