A little earlier today, my wife and I were discussing Eclectablog's heartbreaking and bile-inducing diary about the Lansing, MI school district being forced to completely eliminate ALL arts, music and phys. ed. programs due to the Snyder/GOP legislature's draconian educational budget cuts.
This led, naturally, into a discussion about how this is just the tip of the iceberg, and how rich Republicans don't give a rat's ass about public education since their kids can just attend private schools, so screw the rest of us.
Our 7-year old son, overhearing our conversation, suddenly burst out saying "That's just like The Sneetches from Dr. Seuss! The Star-Bellied Sneetches thought they were better than everyone else because they had stars on their bellies, but they weren't!"
To say that this brought a smile to our faces is a huge understatement; we were thrilled that he had made, as his own public school teacher puts it, a "text to world connection", finding a lesson he learned in a book and applying it to a real-world situation.
But that's not the half of it. Check out what he decided to do next. I helped him by finding the appropriate images online and printing them out, but he thought up, wrote and did everything else below completely by himself:
The greatest irony of all, of course, is that he was able to grasp some pretty Big Concepts and connect them to his stories thanks, in large part, to him receiving an excellent PUBLIC EDUCATION.
Update: Wow. Don't get me wrong, I've been on the rec list a number of times but I really wasn't expecting this one to get so much attention; it was just a proud papa bragging. Much appreciated.
On a more somber note, however, I do need to call attention to one of the ugliest bills that the GOP-controlled legislature tried to ram through last December (unsuccessfully at the time) being rammed through (successfully this time, in a slightly modified version) earlier this week. Rather than put a downer note on this diary, I'd ask you to just take a quick read of this other one.