CSotD: Maintaining our Baldricks

Alix, the younger daughter in Stone Soup, has been going through a transformation this summer into what promises to be a bright, curious little girl who, I presume, will provide a contrast to her older, more slacker-like sister.

What I particularly like about the move is that we've already established that she's a funny kid and something of a daredevil jockette, so that, despite the fact that, in the land of comics, you can't be both athletic and good at academics, we won't have storylines in which the smart kid is an unpopular nerd who screws up at sports.

One deserving topic I suspect we are about to tackle in this story arc is the underfunding of education. As noted before, we hear all these speeches about where our students line up compared to students in other countries, but then we back away from actually doing anything about it beyond demonizing teachers' unions and piling on more bubble sheets.

And, yes, on the local level, we end up with itinerant librarians and science teachers.

It's nice they're bringing in science teachers at all. It's only in the past two decades or so that elementary educators have recognized that little guys need more specialized exposure to science, having, up to this point, counted on generalized elementary teachers to be able to teach the subject.

But then it's underfunded, along with a lot of things kids need but that we're not willing to pay for.

And I suppose that, as long as we call it "things kids need," it will remain that way.

Until we begin to talk about "workforce development" in terms that go beyond high school internships, we're going to be subject to the short-sightedness of misers who think of public schools as "educating other people's kids" rather than "preparing someone to maintain the economy once I've retired."

The specific issue of school funding aside, however, we live in a world that celebrates ignorance and stupidity. In his latest cartoon, Matt Bors shows how this sort of thing plays out among adults and in the arena of the here-and-now:

We've always had stupidity and ignorance in abundance, and the supreme idiocy of (for instance) the right rail on HuffPost, which is dedicated to getting morons to click on cute doggies and pictures of celebrity boobs (which makes three days in a row, if you're counting) is nothing new.

There were stupid, vulgar puppet shows and filthy farces throughout the late Middle Ages, and if, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, people like Goldoni and Moliere and even Machiavelli transformed commedia into engaging, thoughtful, hilarious wit, their work has survived because it rose above the idiotic mental sewage that filled the theaters on most nights.

But here's the saving grace of those ancient diversions: The stinking, ignorant, pestilent morons who were the eager audience for this brainless vulgarity were not expected or even permitted to help direct their nations' futures.

Their function in society was to supply brute labor in peacetime and fodder for the cannons in war, and they didn't have to be bright or perceptive or terribly well-informed to perform either task. Probably best if they weren't.

And if you think the Baldricks of our current world are confined to the poor districts, if you think they are all on welfare or wandering the streets in search of crack, you have not looked at what is succeeding for the television networks, or what passes for science and history on the cable channels or what is being shared and re-shared on Facebook.

As Bors notes, we have some very well-dressed, socially acceptable people making decent wages and living perfectly average middleclass lives who have little or no interest in anything that requires more brainpower than God has bestowed upon the average Labrador retriever.

And if I believed in the nutty, improbable conspiracies that are so appealling to these modern Baldricks, I'd be tracking down the tall building dedicated to keeping it that way, the place where people come up with programs like "The Jersey Shore" and "Toddlers and Tiaras" and science and history shows that declare interstellar visitors and magical assassination bullets to be perfectly credible explanations of reality.

Somewhere in that building would be a group of cartoonists, assigned to portray going to a museum or attending a science camp as something boring that is only for kids whom nobody likes, who can't play sports and who are the inevitable and rightful victims of bullies.

And, once I found them, I would send Alix Stone in there to kick their asses.