Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

Some bad ideas just won’t go away and a truly lousy one is rearing its ugly head once again in these parts.
School uniforms.

Really, it’s true. Despite this being the 21st century, there are still people who believe conformity in dress is a way to improve public education. And some of those people are in Woonsocket. The city’s two senators, Roger Picard and Marc Cote, have introduced legislation that would allow student dress to be regimented and dictated by school authorities.
School authorities, unsurprisingly, applaud the effort.
The very concept of a school uniform is the antithesis of education.
The goal of education should be to foster individuality and encourage creativity — to allow and equip the student to learn how think for him or herself, generate his or her own ideas, or ways of looking at things.
Uniforms engender conformity and groupthink — terrific if you want to teach kids to stay in line and do what they are told; terrible if you want to teach them to think out of the box, as they will be called upon to do more and more once they are out of school. It is the way to educate an adequate automaton, not to enable and spur genius to flower.
Dressing kids in uniforms doesn’t tell them that the sky is the limit, that they can soar as far and as fast as their individual initiative and talent will take them. What it tells them is that they are interchangeable cogs in the machine and that acting individually and thinking creatively is NOT valued. It tells them that, all in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.
The notion of uniforms for school children was obnoxious enough when they were limited to parochial schools and we were teaching kids to populate the industrialized, assembly-line workplace of years gone by, now it has lost all contact with the reality students will be graduating into.
What was one of the first things those Silicon Valley computer companies became noted for? They famously freed their employees from the jacket and tie, business suit dress code that is the “uniform” of corporate America. They let workers dress as they please — come to work as you are, so to speak — precisely because they didn’t want them to look and act and think like everyone else in the room. And everyone there has been coming to work in jeans and shorts and T-shirts for so long that some are starting to choose to express themselves by coming to work wearing — jackets and ties.
That is the workplace we need to be educating kids for, not some 19th or 20th century factory that their parents remember, but is never going to be part of their lives.
To survive and thrive in the 21st century information economy, individuality is a prerequisite. Dressing kids in uniforms strips that away.
If we are going to stuff school children into uniforms we might as well go all the way — have them wear those Mao jackets that were the “uniform” of the Chinese in the 1950s and 60s. At least then we will be honest about what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Uniforms are just one more way that we are teaching young, impressionable students exactly the wrong thing about society and the individual’s place in it. They are of a piece with cops roaming high school campuses, cameras in corridors and on school buses and metal detectors at the door.
We are not teaching them that freedom and independence and individuality are precious and must be fought for and preserved. We are teaching them to devalue democracy and individual liberties and to obediently submit themselves to arbitrary authority and capricious rules. We are teaching them from the start, when they are in school, that those things are normal and natural and right; they will never know a world where they weren’t subject to intrusions on freedom and liberty and individuality and privacy. 
We are not teaching them to be great Americans; we are indoctrinating them to become what were once called “good Germans.”

It happens every winter
This being February, you have no doubt seen highway crews out on Route 95 and other major roads shoveling cold patch into potholes.
It happens every winter. The potholes get egregious, people scream about them and something has to be done. So the DOT guys go out with dumptrucks filled with cold patch and start filling up the holes with it.
But no sooner does the guy with the orange vest and hard hat tap the top of the patched pothole with his shovel, and he and the truck move on to the next crater, than a car rolls right over it and the cold patch loosens a bit. Then an 18-wheeler comes by and really shakes the patch loose. Rains come and wash away more of the patch, and the water that gets into the hole freezes and expands and further damages the patch. Then it snows, a plow comes past and you’ve got your pothole back.
Except now there’s residue of cold patch in there, so that has to be cleaned out before the pothole can be properly fixed when spring comes. (Spring is going to come this year, isn’t it?) So really, you’re worse off than when you had the original pothole.
I fear that is what is going to happen with the federal money that is going to come to Rhode Island from President Barack Obama’s stimulus package.
I’m afraid the legislature is going to take that big pile of cash and shovel it into the pothole that is the budget deficit.
The economy is going to keep driving trucks over that hole, and worsening unemployment is going to continue to rain and snow into it. When all is said and done, all that cash is going to be knocked out of the hole and pushed to the curb. We will have the pothole back and all the Obama money will be gone forever.
Another opportunity wasted in Rhode Island. Can anyone say “tobacco securitization money”? I knew you could.
Governor Carcieri has taken to the radio airwaves to warn against squandering the stimulus. While I disagree with the steps he would take to avoid wasting the Obama money, he is right that we should not use that cash to just backfill the deficit.
Let’s see what happens.