Regents' presentation here manipulative

Recently, The Sun's guest columnist Gary Knox commented on a "meeting" hosted in Yuma by five regents from Northern Arizona University. He noted in paragraph one that they had renamed the crisis in education "the quiet crisis" - though I don't think that is what they call it in the inner city, or in Iraq.
 
And not surprisingly in his last paragraph Knox reported on their need for "funds." What came between those two paragraphs was of course classic "Knox," and I won't address it beyond saying that, insofar as it softened the immediacy of the crisis and the implications of a group of politicians spending public dollars to ask for more dollars, it was completely predictable.

Since the meeting was held at my Cultural Center I was actually there, and, because of one big question, I stayed. That question was: "Has America seen 'its day in the sun,' and is it over for us?" This is a question that has been close to my heart for some years now and consequently I stayed to listen. Here is my report.
 
The "meeting" was run by Regent Duvall who asked the critical question. Then he showed the video that Knox referred to as "powerful." The video however merely repeated what the man had already said and was insofar a piece of pedantry - the kind of repetitive uninspired use of visuals common among techno-obsessed teachers who are, I guess, the ones Knox tells us are "better trained... than their predecessors."
 
The video was powerful though, at least in the way Maoist or Stalinist productions were powerful - full of bright colors, waving flags, romantic music and solemn rhetoric. Insofar it was simply a piece of slick propaganda, manipulative and insulting.
 
And what's worse, since the video depended for any effect upon a poorly trained and naïve audience, the whole evening was pure Beelzebub - in effect, they were trusting that in Arizona schools we have created such fools as would believe such overt propaganda! And sadly, since there was no outcry, I think the ploy worked.

After that, the substance of the "meeting" was as follows: Five politicians, each in turn, praising and shamelessly flattering one another, ad nauseam, right up into the wrap-up. And that was it! Not one solution to the "crisis" was ever suggested, and not one citizen was asked for his opinion.
 
In other words it wasn't a meeting at all. It was an orchestrated opportunity for five cynical politicians - and they are doing the same dog and pony show all over the state - to spent tax dollars to puff themselves up over a crisis (education) which not one of them has the knowledge or the will to fix!
 
It was a complete sham. Indeed, one of them admitted to me, afterward, that he wondered how "telling the truth would motivate people." Imagine! He actually said this. Of course there are people who don't know the difference and are attracted to a falsehood rather than the truth - apparently the same products of the Arizona school system he hoped he was addressing!
 
In conclusion, what, I wonder, is the opinion of the regents concerning those who they expect to fall for such a sham? I hope my neighbors can glean from this little report some indication of why our schools are in such terrible trouble today  -only the empty chest of a calculating cynic could generate and then stand beside that regent's shameless admission, the admission that, in education, deceit has been raised to the status of method, ends always justifying means.
 
And, unfortunately, in my long experience as an education who taught humanities here at NAU, this ignorant, cynical and manipulative attitude of educational leaders is not the least bit unusual. Shameless, utterly shameless!


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JAY CLARK
Yuma