Irony with my coffee and newspapers, bleah.

Our Lesson for the Day is immigration taking kids out of school. Right. But here's a story badly cast as gifted kids needing more program funding, when
the real story is the counterproductive irony of gifted young schoolkids spending the last 15 years getting excited to be out of school (with all their parent volunteers in tow) to take the same old field trip to Ellis Island, to study polite, curated, circumscribed history exhibits they can discuss and be tested on, someday write college essays about -- while the raw immigrant drama of THIS century, the one shaking our country to its policy and political foundations, plays out in all its culturally not-so-well-planned, technically if not dangerously criminal, decidedly unacademic, constitutionally muddled glory in and out of the neighborhood schools and streets of the opposite coast.

"People are taking it to a whole other level," said [high school student]Laura Avitia. "I don't think they know why we were protesting."

At least she's learning SOMETHING about real life then . . .I heard on cable news last night that a middle school near Denver has banned not just flags or t-shirts sporting slogans but all red, white and blue fabric, not just flags but clothing. Unmarked socks and sweaters. On pain of expulsion. Freedom? Go Team USA.

Education Week reports today that Elizabeth A. Cook, the principal at Marston Middle School, walked with her protesting students on both Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. They were "sounding off about immigration."

Every 20 minutes or so, she encouraged the students--many of whom were likely to face detention or Saturday school upon their return--to turn back. A few did.

“I said to them, ‘I like the fact you’re thinking about these issues. We want you to think critically,’ ” Ms. Cook said. But . . .“The law says you have to be in school. The message is, you have choices,” she said.

If our patriotism both justifies and jeopardizes free public schooling, then to keep us free as a nation we ourselves must be carefully controlled by government? School and the taxes that fund it are compulsory, all to set us free? What a lesson, clearly marked Made in America.

Maybe our free groupthink about the freedom of our compulsory schooling isn't all that free or informed. How does it profit freedom, for School to teach us to think of ourselves as free even while we're far from home against our will? How can Principal Cook's official message of compulsory schooling mandated by law be "come back to school because you have CHOICES?"

One could argue that Ellis Island in its heyday both justified and jeopardized both patriotism and freedom, but it was a different time and place from what faces the Class of 2026.

Were freedom and patriotism different too, or just the lessons we were taught about them?

Teach Ellis Island to smart kids as as a lesson today, and picture them trying to apply it by recreating a well-guarded island of immigrant isolation for authoritarian processing -- by turning Texas into another Ellis Island, say-- and what policy horrors would it percolate for next-century gifted kids to look back on from their gifted classes, to study and disavow with school-girl shivers, long after we've stopped pretending compulsion will set us free? The Minutemen might not be the half of it.

Yet standardized public school remains the correct answer to all such problems. (I have to interject that it's not smart to call any forced answer gifted education.)

Here's how the modern lesson of freedom and patriotism goes at school --
Smart, schooled, law-abiding citizen families like ours keep upping our school taxes, on the homes we're raising our own kids in, meaning to generously fund every school entitlement that every conceivable interest group demands, with enough for even teachers' families to live well and pay higher taxes themselves. The cultural lesson we've accepted is that if we do that, plus freely comply (what oxymorons we are, really!) with everything the schools demand by law of our families and communities, year-round from dawn to midnight in perpetuity, then someday, when we're all tax-indentured and micromanaged -- but freely sacrificing, for freedom! -- then at last "free" schooling will set us "free" through the "free-thinking" of all the fine citizens we'll have produced to solve all those problems that freedom through school compulsion created in the first place.

Are you thinking hard, did you get the lesson, can you see the results?

The smart kids are indeed busy thinking about democracy and civic responsibility, but have been taken out of school by their teacher for an irrelevant history lesson from the past. The culturally and historically shaky but nevertheless activist kids have self-engaged to take themselves out of school (for the thrill of being free to join the crowd), but aren't so smart about how to actually change anything for the better.

So they accomplish nothing of consequence except creating "consequences" to be inflicted against themselves, not gaining real freedom for themselves or those whose freedom they leave school to support. Their by-now-well-paid and well-certified teachers leave school to march with them but not to solve their problems or ours as a nation, just to get the kids back in school. For freedom, of course.

So none of them are actually thinking, teaching or learning about how to creatively and effectively address the real world challenges we face now.
And despite all our compulsion-as-freedom, nobody's in school anyway.
Well, at least on television comedy channels and online journalism blogs, some folks (not schoolfolks) seem to be thinking in productive, enlightened, non-partisan ways about what our culture could DO that might actually make things better instead of worse -- the operative words being "thinking" and "debating" and the operative reality being "out of school."

Emily Messner
Taking on the Week's Big Issue: Immigration
A few controversial points [Fareed] Zakaria made in the interview with Jon Stewart.

Debaters, if you're not sick of the immigration issue yet, I'd love to get your thoughts on these ideas.

If that's where the real thinking and debate is happening -- out of school -- then no wonder that's where everyone wants to be: out of school!

Thinking Jacques Barzun was right - we're at the painfully messy end of a 500-year era, decaying into the next renaissance. Man, I wish he'd lived a few more years, to write as a Frenchman about what's happening there now with youth striking and riots. Seems student protests are like war - in any time, anyplace, they arise from the kind of demographic, economic and cultural cycles that are globally high-risk right now.

Like hurricanes.
Just 56 days to go, until forces beyond control take control, and dictate our freedoms again.

You know how we used to warn a big one was coming, back when Ellis Island was in control of immigration? Flying a big ol' flag.

Gee, the coffee gets bitter near the bottom, wonder if somewhere in Louisiana or the Florida panhandle, it's illegal to wear red and black socks to school?