by Charles R Lewis

    By now just about everybody has had his opportunity to puzzle and marvel at the recent reply given by South Carolina government school honor roll student and Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin Upton to the question:

    "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think this is?"   [Note: you'll notice that's apparently just according to polls.  In reality it's probably more like four fifths.]

To wit:

   "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children."

    The most recent efforts at attempting to glean insight from the above passage have focused on the hypothesis that the difficulty lies in the syntax.  A simple unscrambling of word order, it is supposed, will reveal a cogent message.  Blogger Mo Rocca (http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/08/27/win-big-its-the-miss-south-carolina-word-scramble/) has even offered up a Kung Fu T-shirt for the cyber linguist who can best de-code its content.

    Nonsense.  Folks fail to take into account what era this is in the state-run schools.

    It's the age of calculators, including ones that take the SAT for you.  Of Spell Check and Grammar Check.  Of Values Clarification and situational ethics that tell us it's okay to plagiarize or copy out of cleverly concealed textbooks on tests as long as your teacher doesn't choose to catch you.

    Of "authentic assessment" where one's instructor - armed with an answer key - is instructed to help one on standardized tests.  Of "portfolio grading" and "performance tasks," which render tests obsolete since they instruct one's instructor to keep (as air-tight evidence of "learning") a day-to-day folder of work which that answer-key-armed instructor has helped one do.

    Of "Service Learning" and "School-to-Work" and "High School Majors," where academics in general is a relic of the distant past.  Oh, and of group assignments, where everybody copies off a group leader who's been helped by that instructor with answer key access.

    In short, nowadays it's possible to go all the way through the K-12 public school curriculum without ever doing one scrap of one's own work.  (In fact, it's just about impossible not to.)

    Fast forward to the finals of a nationally televised beauty pageant, with a 3.5 gpa government school pupil being asked for the first time in her life to produce coherent verbiage without the opportunity to run it through either a word processing program or an instructor with a word processing program.  

    What we heard was nothing more than a typical "rough draft" of a mini-theme paper that any word processing program worth its gigabytes would transform into a polished product within nanoseconds.  And I have proof.

    I ran Miss Caitlin Upton's seemingly disjointed, meaningless meanderings through my trusty MicroMentality Paragraff Fickser, and it spit out the following:

    "It is my point of view (no more or less valid than that of anyone else's point of view - what's true for me is not necessarily true for you) that Americans of the United States (as opposed to Americans of, say, South or Central America, who have just as much a right to the title, "American," as do Americans of the United States) are incapable of finding their imperialistic, energy hogging homeland on a map because, increasingly, their Internet filters are blocking MapQuest.  (This happens principally to United States Americans who are out there on the road with their laptops, in fruitless search of hot spots.)

    "There is an obvious analogy between our education system and the likes of South Africa - not the education system in South Africa, but South Africa itself.  You see, that country's national pastime of tying tires around the necks of evil Winnie Mandela opponents and setting them on fire is a lot like what our schools do to people who try to infect them with politically incorrect reasoning.  This correction of political incorrectness is a somewhat more violent version of the auto-underlining of misspellings in Microsoft Word.

    "We do not need such maps, by the way, to locate Iraq, whose images of United States American defeat are everywhere on the mainstream newscasts.  I believe this is as it should be, since we are such losers in Iraq that we would probably even lose a map of the place if we had one.

    "Our education is over, here in U.S. America.  From now on, it simply ought to assist us to see the wisdom in offering much more foreign aid to wonderful countries like South Africa, yes, Iraq (at least our expenditures there are helping to transfer out much of our obscene wealth), and the nations of Asia - especially Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and the People's Republic of China, which is in the midst of a purely defensive military build-up of an unpecedented scale, a build-up focused on the future of our children, such as it exists."

    Now do you get it?  Duh.