Dr. Feel Good and the P.C. beltway boys...

I have a hard time blaming the degradation of our educational system and the dumbing down of society in general in America entirely on politicians. I place a great deal of this travesty squarely in the lap of people like Dr. Spock, who led several generations of parents in the country to believe that it was somehow wrong to have expectations of your kids. As a result, the attitude of parents toward the educational system eventually became, "Don't make Johnny do things he doesn't like, or things that are really hard to do. Also, don't make Johnny feel bad when he cannot excel for the reasons above. Let him know that it is perfectly acceptable to be *below average*". That and a whole lot more tripe of the same ilk. The quality of our educational system is driven more by the oversight of parents than it is by politicians. Since parents pay their salaries through taxes, and since they see the parents much more often, educators respond to parents wishes far quicker than those of politicians.

I'm not arguing that there isn't runaway political correctness and enforced mediocrity in government. Quite the contrary! As a public servant of nearly 35 years, I have first hand experience with the ugly truth of bureaucracy. If the general public only knew the BS that goes on within their government bureaucracy, they'd nuke everything inside the beltway and start over again from scratch! In my experience, nothing is happening between Fredericksburg, MD and the Delaware Bay that is even worth the powder to blow it kingdom come! Any federal agency that show relative efficiency does so mainly because the federal employee minions have enough pride in their work to ignore the stupidity of the upper levels of the bureaucracy and instead do what they know to be right. Somehow, in spite of bureaucratic management's best efforts to screw things up beyond belief, the hard working and dedicated paeans manage to make things work.

Think about these things the next time you want to tee off about how dumb kids are today or about how lazy government employees are........