I have often said that I don’t really approve of insult humor. I don’t think calling someone names really adds to the discussion in any useful way, and the real point of humor is to reveal the truth in a way that is palatable because it is surprising enough to make you laugh. Revealed truth is much funnier than calling someone names. So when I call Donald Trump the king of rotten cantaloupe rinds, I am really being no more clever than he is talking about Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary.
Three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, (from left to right) Famine, Cinnamon Hitler, and the Pale Rider, Death.
So, what in the heck am I doing talking about Golliwogs in this post?
A Golliwog is a Raggedy Ann-type rag doll from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were a common doll type for typical little white girls in typical little middle class families. My Aunt Jean, my father’s sister, had one as a child. A female one with a red dress with black spots. You could flip that doll over and underneath her skirt was a different doll, a yellow-haired white girl in a blue and black dress. The image has become poison in modern culture because the blackface-minstrel roots of the character is now deemed racist and offensive. The Golliwogs in the children’s books of Florence Upton and Grid Blyton, though, were actually quite heroic, good-hearted and kind.
As much as we vilify people for having them nowadays, there are many people who secretly adore them and wish to collect and preserve them. I have long been enthralled by the brilliant 1920’s newspaper cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McKay. But there are many who would lecture me sternly about that because there is at least one Golliwog character in the cartoon strip, and it is even debatable that the main character of Flip, the “bad kid”, is just another kind of Golliwog.
Now, the point of this article is to make relentless fun of Betsy De Vos, the harpy that Donald Trump has put in charge of the implosion of the Department of Education. There are a number of very bad things about this wicked witch and her policies. Diane Ravitch does an excellent job of explaining what’s wrong with De Vos and her wicked witch plans in Ravitch’s education blog, linked here. You should read all about it so you know why I am regressing into vacant-headed teacher burblings about her, and resorting to the kind of insult humor you find me committing in this blog post.
Betsy De Vos looks at public school children and sees Golliwogs. She is suspicious of their pedigree and basically doesn’t like them. Remember, we are talking about public school children, not the children in upper class, rich private schools, the only kind De Vos actually touts. She wants to give Golliwogs only the minimums absolutely necessary, the spoiled and the spilled milk. The cream belongs to rich kids. And she’s not prejudiced or racist, oh, no. She sees poor white kids as just as golliwoggie as poor black kids, and she would have no problem pandering to Ben Carson’s kids. Ben has lots of money. He can be Sleepy McBoing-boing as much as he wants, and take off after phantom luggage whenever he wants, because money keeps you from being the detestable Golliwog.
But the secret… the revealed truth is… Golliwogs are worth loving and educating. Diversity and the resilience learned from hardship and poverty are priceless things, resources too rarely put to good use. Most of the kids I truly loved as a teacher were Golliwogs. Not just the chocolate-flavored ones, though those were very precious and precocious children, but also the vanilla-flavored ones, the caramel-flavored ones, the blueberry-flavored ones and the grape-flavored ones. (Okay, maybe they were only blue and purple in my crazy old head. And maybe I shouldn’t be making metaphors that suggest I am promoting eating school children. That was Jonathan Swift’s thing.) But Betsy De Vos and her boss, Donald Trump, will never understand that, and never see the true value in them. If we are ever again going to have a fair and just system of education, we have to give value to the Golliwogs.
There you have it, the results of 31 years of doodling on the chalkboard (which became the dry erase board). And yes, I did tell them the cartoon fairy drew all the pictures. Especially when they were in my class for the second or third year when they asked, “Who does all the pictures on the board?” And yes, I started doing this back in dinosaur days in white chalk on a green blackboard, followed by colored chalk, which later became a gray marker-board for washable marker, and finally became dry erase white board. And I really bought my own chalk and markers too. Teachers do that, you know.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, education, humor, insight, teaching
Tagged as education, Finland's education system, humor, lessons learned, teaching, teaching better