Long ago, big shots among certain Pacific Northwest nations had a custom called the potlatch, in which the giver demonstrated his wealth, power, and prestige by giving away fantastic quantities of, like, everything–or even simply burning up stuff so everyone could see that he had stuff to burn.
We don’t have the potlatch anymore, but we do have school budgets, which are almost the same thing.
I missed this the first time around, four years ago, but Michelle Malkin revisited it today in her column: the time the Los Angeles school district potlatched $1 billion–yeah, we said “a billion dollars”–to buy iPads for the kiddies (https://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2018/12/26/beware-silicon-valley-santas-in-the-schools-n2538037). The iPads came pre-loaded with Common Core crapola and “an onslaught of online ads.”
Did the kids get a billion dollars’ worth of smarter? In a word, no. They did get kind of tired of having their faces glued to a screen every waking moment.
But “educators” haven’t learned their lesson, Malkin says, and Big Tech is taking full advantage of educators’ wooden-headedness, showering public schools with a mass of shiny hi-tech toys–this at a time when at least some researchers are beginning to wonder if it’s really, truly such a good thing to have kids staring at a computer screen all day instead of playing, running around, and being normal.
A billion bucks–hot dog! The people of Los Angeles had to work for that money. It was their money. They earned it. Then the government–in this case the city educational authorities–took it and pissed a billion dollars of it into a fan.
Let me leave you with this thought: Kill public education, and leftism dies.
Too bad the iPads didn’t come programmed with all of R.J. Rushdoony’s books and audio tapes.
Can you imagine the leftids’ anguish, if that happened? Gee, that would be lovely to see!
Tablet computers, etc. have the potential to be quite useful, but they are frequently misused, and this sounds like a perfect example.