What We've Done to Teaching and "Education" in America

The Fellowship for Putting Stupid Theories into Schools

We’re known by many names across the spectrum left to right

Promoting fear and ostracism, ignorance and blight,

We promise health and happiness in dimly distant days

And ask your current sacrifice to give ourselves a raise.

We don’t get caught because we’ve got new education rules

As one by one we take away our children’s thinking tools

The Fellowship for Putting Stupid Theories into Schools.

It’s awkward when our kids come home with something they have learned

That would have in the good old days have got us staked and burned.

They question blind authority as if that were old hat,

They judge our bland hypocrisy – and we’ll have none of that!

They’ve even said that we should have alternative energy fuels!

But we’ll stop that: we’ll take away their critical thinking tools,

The Fellowship for Putting Stupid Theories into Schools.

Postmodernist, conservative, we’re pretty much on par

We undermine enlightenment embracing the bizarre.

Oh, nothing good will come of it if children learn to think --

They’ll realize we’ve left them at and teetering on the brink.

Our only hope’s to rot their brains and turn them into fools

By teaching tests instead of teaching critical thinking tools.

The Fellowship for Putting Stupid Theories into Schools.

Whenever you have heard a child say something really dumb,

Or seen adults enamored with what art has now become,

Or read about the legislature’s vote to buy a tank

Instead of raising teachers’ pay, it’s us you have to thank –

It isn’t just by accident our citizens are fools --

For we’re the ones who give the zealous ignorant their tools:

The Fellowship for Putting Stupid Theories into Schools.

-- Marcus Bales