Lack of teachers causes crime

It must be true, because someone said it on CNN.

So I was at the gym, walking on the treadmill, idly watching CNN, reading the captioning. They were talking about California, of course, and its financial plight.

Apparently the financial crisis is affecting school funding. One poor soul, no doubt a product of the California education system, said: "If they lay off teachers there will be more people in jail."

The first image that flashed into my brain was of a frenzied and desperate mob of pedagogues storming the finer retail establishments of the state. But I dismissed the idea.

However, I couldn't quite follow her reasoning. How could laying off teachers affect the prison population? Are they going to put the laid off teachers in jail?

Or will the absence of some teachers make the already miserable school system more ineffective than it already is in educating young people?

When my children were growing up, lots of their friends attended Catholic schools. Some of these children were in classes with more than fifty children. But they learned. Their test scores were higher than those of the kids in public school, year after year.

Now, after years of giving kids a better education and for less money, the Catholic Church is closing schools all over the country. Only in America! Apparently nothing fails like success.

We urgently need repairs to our roads, so highway money is being spent on bike paths while commuters sit in their cars spewing exhaust into the air. More money is being used to prop up passenger trains nobody uses. Coal and natural gas are available all over this country, but we are not allowed to use it. Instead, laws like cap and trade are passed to hobble business and ensure a continuing shortage of jobs.

Open your eyes, people! Why are we importing engineers and chemists from third world countries when we could be educating our own people for this important work? Our students are leaving college dumber than they were when they started. Yes, the colleges are able to extract common sense from the young and educate them in Grudge Studies. So, after graduation, while they fold clothes at the Gap, they can brood about the injustice visited upon them by Society.

Why are too many students attending law school and too few attending medical school? Weird how that works! The budding lawyers will soon join their Ethnic Studies peers in a career in retail. Meanwhile our hospitals will be filled with interns with incomprehensible accents.

And all because we laid off some teachers!