October 16, 2003

George W. Bush

c/o White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington DC, 20509-1600

Dear President Bush,

There is a startling epidemic in this country. Its victims far out number those succumbing to cancer or AIDS. Its symptoms, though physically unnoticeable are just as detrimental, yet do not receive the same awareness as the two aforementioned diseases. I am speaking, of course, of stupidity. And knowing that you are afflicted by this very mental deficiency, I’ll make every attempt to use small words and lots of supplementary pictures.

While campaigning for the presidency you posed the question, “is our children learning?” Mr. President, I am afraid them is not. Despite years of federal education legislation, the latest being your administration’s own No Child Left Behind Act, some students still lag behind their peers intellectually. Your program would like to make teachers and schools personally liable for their densest pupils, placing the blame in the system, not the student. However, this does not take into account the possibility that some children are just born dumb and continue to fail, regardless of tutorial efforts. Is it really fair then that these Darwinian abnormalities consistently bring down the standard of otherwise decent schools and place normal children at a disadvantage later in life?

Our public school system should not rank as low as it does internationally, given our current position of global dominance. Surely if we are expected to maintain the title of “super power” we must remedy our situation. We could remain on the path outlined in the NCLB Act, however as stated in a recent article in the Washington Post concerning the bill, it could take as many as 11 years to see real results and the legislation has already become a problem for you in key swing states, such as West Virginia, where married mothers vote in high numbers. Sir, you do not have the next 11 years, and given an unsubstantiated war and faltering economy, it’s hard to say with sincerity that you’ll have the next four.

As a citizen currently enrolled in a public school system implementing your plan and having just reached the legal voting age, I feel that is not just my right but my duty to propose to you a drastic, but reasonable idea. I suggest that children who fail to meet state mandated levels of learning should and must be removed from school.

The problem then becomes what to do with these frontal-lobe defectives. Since school is obviously out of the question, there are limited number of avenues they can pursue: the military, labor camps, or third, (and what should be avoided at all costs) they could languish away and become a further drain on society.

To decide this a series of tests should administered at various stages in elementary school beginning even before a child starts kindergarten so as to monitor his or her development, or more importantly, any lack thereof. These tests would be modeled somewhat after the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Alfred Binet was commissioned by the French government to create an adequate assessment for childhood development. Theorizing that all children follow the same path intellectually, Binet, and his collogue Theodore Simon, drew up a series short answer problems to calculate a person’s “mental age,” or the chronological age that typically corresponds with their mental performance. Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, later took Binet’s idea and with it created an equation to measure the intelligence quotient of an individual.

Using Terman’s equation, you could develop a system to determine how a child might best serve this country. Students with an IQ of 100 or more (a100 being someone who is exactly where they are expected to be intellectually) would be allowed to continue with their education, as teaching them would not become a waste of the taxpayers’ money. Some one with an IQ between 99-83 could serve our armed services marvelously as they are still teachable…as long as they are only being taught one or two things. Anyone below that level but still able to tie their own shoes would be sent to labor camps where they could work in a humane environment with their intellectual peers for various international corporations such as Nike and the Gap, who in pervious years have come under fire from human rights organizations for their labor practices. Not only would this create a much larger work force and less dependence on foreign-made products, it would bolster the economy, as the children would be paid competitive wages. There is no use in production if a vast majority of the population could not afford the product. Finally, a child with a ludicrously substandard IQ, but without any physical problems could be easily released into the wild where it could be among like-minded beasts (as long as it doesn’t happen across to a group of primates who, as studies have shown, appear to be smarter than some people.)

The only exception to this testing would be children new to this country that do not speak the language yet as it would impossible to them test in English and expect them to perform as they would in their own language. However if, once they do become proficient in this language, they are revealed to be bilingually moronic then they too will be removed so as not to infect other children with their idiocy.

Of course as a result, a social rift might become apparent between the intelligencia and the peons. But in actuality it’s already occurred, so there’s no use in denying it any longer. Every society has haves and have-nots. By purposefully not educating our lower classes (which would be determined by intelligence) we don’t run the risk of uprising. The upper echelon of this country would continue to participate in politics as the fore fathers of this country intended. They knew that the “common man” was in no place to dictate authority.

Every child should be given the opportunity of education in this country. But opportunity does not equate results. What someone chooses to do with their education should not be the responsibility of a school district or even a teacher. The stigma against knowledge in this country is not the fault of the system; it’s the culture. Ignorance, like racism, is a result of poor parenting. We breed mediocrity and it is in those first years of a child’s life, before they even set foot in a school building, that determine their willingness to learn. There is no point in educating an ignorant child if they are raised to be so. We might as well find a way to use them for the betterment of the union.

Cordially,

Meredith Jones