You cannot save every soul, no matter how hard you try.

A good general with any objective in mind has to know that there are casualties. You do not risk the entire battalion in an attempt to rescue a straggler with little chance of continued survival.

I think it's time to think this way about education. George W. Bush, our current president, campaigned saying that education was his top priority. His oft-repeated slogan was "no child left behind." Let's think about what that means.

The presumption is that every person is educable. While certainly some are not, I believe that almost everyone has the capacity to attain a reasonably high educational level. But not if they are unwilling, preferring video games, sex, or making money. And not if they can't sit still for an hour, can't concentrate enough to read, or won't control themselves enough not to badmouth their teachers.

Our educational system is filled with such students; they cost a phenomenal amount and have little hopes of graduating with a high school or college degree. Yet our public high schools in particular feel great pressure, as their graduation rates are published and criticized by politicians, to graduate everyone, to educate everyone, to never write off a student. Laws are in place to guarantee children with disabilities as questionable and over-diagnosed as attention deficit disorder (ADD) special considerations in the classroom. Teachers with classrooms of students who make threats and disrupt class are blamed for the low grades they give, if they give them. We're looking for easy fixes. We've tried busing, moving children around so that poor and minority areas are intermixed with middle-class and white areas; it doesn't work. We've claimed that dilapidated schools are to blame in poor and low-scoring areas, that no one can learn in such an environment, and we've built state-of-the-art, beautiful scores only to find test scores actually drop. The problems continue, schools are blamed while politicians and their constituent families become irate, and no solution seems in sight.

Let's look at the origin of these problems. One major problem is that school attendance is mandatory until a person is eighteen. This was not always the case; for the first half of this century, it was hardly rare not to have a high school degree, and many students simply stopped attending. The problem of mandatory attendance is that it puts into our schools students who do not want to be there. Putting students who do not want to be in school into the classroom means behavioral problems and lack of work, disruption of the education of those who want to be there and lower grades for those who don't. My education in high school was crippled by students who would probably have dropped out if they could have done so, and teachers who hold standards have to award poor grades which lead to them being accused of being poor, and sometimes racist, teachers when the exact opposite is true.

Why did school attendance become compulsory? Because there were many teenagers who quit school and simply hung around town, sometimes getting into trouble, creating an eyesore and an uncomfortable environment. So politicians shoved them into our schools, ostensibly to give them an education whether they wanted one or not. But one cannot force an education on another person, at least short of alligator clips and electric current. And what was really going on was that our school system was being used for social experimentation. It would not be the last time, but the consequences were disastrous. Instead of demonstrating the importance of education, the move to make school attendance mandatory used schools as a holding ground for problem teenagers, keeping them off the street like a form of halfway house. This hardly tends to encourage education.

The establishment of "special ed" and "gifted" classes for the worst and best students, respectively, sought to deal with this problem. Children with behavioral problems or cognitive disabilities, who in another era would never be in school in the first place, were moved from the regular classrooms that they were disrupting and placed in separate classes with teachers who, hypothetically, were trained in teaching such children. Meanwhile, the best of the best were placed in separate courses, often only for a few hours a week, with teachers who gave them additional projects and were, hypothetically, trained in working with gifted children. I myself was the beneficiary of gifted classes, and they were the highlight of my grade school weeks which were otherwise filled with students with whom I couldn't relate and teachers whom I liked but who often had to forbid me to answer questions because I was often the only one who knew the answers. This meant that I was saddled with constant repetition and teaching on a level that never challenged me. The other students crowded around me during group work as I explained how to arrive at answers or how various systems worked; I rarely minded, but I would have preferred, at 10 to 17, to be learning rather than teaching.

Unfortunately, there was a great problem with classes for students at different levels. Children in "special ed" classes were called retarded and picked on by other students. This did not please them or their parents. This, combined with the fact that teachers of such students typically could not keep such difficult students progressing at the pace of their normal brethren, led to the idea of "mainstreaming" -- essentially the dismantling of special education and the shoving of these students back into normal classes. Parents have increasingly pushed for their children with mental disabilities and chronic behavior problems to be mainstreamed, believing their children capable and not wanting them to become social outcasts.

But education is not about making people feel good. In fact, education is often difficult, even painful, inciting to self-doubt and the feeling of loss that comes with self-examination. As in the military world, there is an objective. Whether one is storming a hill or trying to understand a highly abstract philosophical or mathematical point, the mission is strenuous, requiring concentration and undivided attention; these are not times for social experimentation.

As a result of parental complaints, "special ed" classes have fallen to mainstreaming children who are not mainstream. As a result of charges of elitism and budgetary constraints, gifted programs across the nation have been killed, stranding the children with the minds most likely to revolutionize in classes that for them are intellectual prisons, resulting in their alienation from formalized learning. Admittedly, there is always a grey line between "special ed" and normal, normal and gifted. There are people on the borders who might be classified either way. So might able-bodied men and non-able-bodied men, but that doesn't mean that we should put cripples in the infantry. Institute a system of appeals, multiple levels within . To forsake such distinctions entirely, on the fundamental basis of a myth of equality that runs in the face of different qualifications, both social and genetic, is as misguided as forcing a basketball team to accept anyone who wants to play, regardless of abilities, and train them all equally. Life is not nearly as fair, nor can we make it, as we have attempted to make our schools.

Let us therefore forsake such nonsense and turn instead to the reasonable. We must discriminate. We do so every day, discerning safe from dangerous, dirty form clean, fun from boring, qualified job applicants from the untrained. In a world without discrimination, people would eat shit as easily as filet mignon. But let us not discriminate amongst people except based on merit. I envision a world of fierce discrimination based on competency but blind to race, to gender, to ethnicity, so long as they do not influence aptitude.

I envision a system that has standardized tests for every grade, with advancing to the next requiring a certain mark on that test. I would like to see each school year's material shorted to half a year, or classes available for the gifted that shorten the length of time in which a year's worth of material is taught, so that exceptional students may easily advance to the next grade when they have mastered the material, rather than waiting because the rest of their class moves at a slower pace. But no one should advance to part three in math without passing part two.

Let us then put an end to social promotion, the passing of children from one grade to the next for social reasons, to prevent them from being ostracized, rather than for reasons of academic merit. Let us create a meritocracy, in which we teach at the level students are at and do not pretend that they are more competent than they are. Let us truly treat everyone as the same, setting the bar the same for all.

Let us stop the nonsense about standardized tests being racially and ethnically discriminatory -- of course they are. There are some cultures and subcultures in which knowing the Pythagorean theorem is seen as copping out to the dominating culture or race. Such attitudes are regrettable, and they may change due to education, but they need not. If a student obstinately retains such an attitude, like a patient who refuses treatment, there is little that can be done. Certainly, there are places and subcultures in which knowing certain rap artists is of greater immediate use, and seen as more important and less foreign, than knowing about Isaac Newton or Christopher Columbus. But Newton and Columbus -- even if others achieved their accomplishments, at least in part, before them, and even if they were horrible people or their actions had consequences which are problematic to our own worldview -- are the common currency of our culture. Does this treat subcultures as equal to the dominant culture? No. But it does measure whether a student can pick up a book or turn on a remotely intellectual television program and understand it. And the possibility of treating all cultures and subcultures equally, while seductive, is not only impossible but disastrous in its implications, including that knowing an obscure homosexual playwright, an obscure Hispanic singer, an obscure transvestite dancer, and an obscure black actor, not to mention football players and the local heroes of every region, are as important as knowing Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or Galileo. It is time to steer clear of this cultural disaster, if still possible.

If the problem is testing versus writing and oral expression, let us have written and oral components to standardized tests. But let us not kid ourselves that Black English Vernacular, no matter how legitimate a form of English, is going to be understood equally in academic classes or simply when applying for a job. It is simply not possible for each teacher, and everyone in each class, to understand Creole, for example. Is this fair? Perhaps not. No one owns English. No one owns history. But we can damn well say that there are standards, fair or not, and that one is more likely to encounter these names than those, these events than those, this grammar and those words than that or those. This is a fact, and though I tend towards idealism, I consider it more ideal to empower members of subcultures to understand the dominant culture than keep them in the ghettos of their own subcultures. To not so empower, to keep people in intellectual ghettos, is the real racism. To be sympathetic to their status as a subculture and educate everyone about the sometimes arbitrary and shifting status of mainstream culture while simultaneously educating people about that dominant culture, this truly empowers, allowing wider interactions and greater understanding.

Treat everyone equally. Review their scores blindly. But if members of certain subcultures, from urban blacks to skateboarding whites, fail at higher rates, they still took the same test. Their background might function as a disability, but probably no more than members of the dominant culture in families without books or the least bit of noteworthy intellectualism. Imagine if Martin Luther King or Vladimir Nabokov had remained entrenched in American black subculture or Russian culture. When one knows the dominant culture and also one's own subculture is when one's own subculture becomes an advantage, becomes transmissible, communicable, is when one acquires the ability to make one's subculture, or parts thereof, part of that dominant culture, studied and revered, in turn, by all.

I say let them fail.

Know that I say this as a teacher who exhausts himself attending to the individual problems of his students. Know that I say this advocating that teachers care for their students, for their personal education, although teaching is, ultimately, a job. It can also be a calling, but teachers have lives. They have family. They have their own personal interests. And they are healthier, and better teachers, when they can go home and not think about that troubled student who they secretly desperately want to succeed but who doesn't attend class or who hands in papers without verbs no matter how many hours are spent in personal and specific discussion about the problem. Teachers, too, have gotten wrapped up in the idea that their students are each their personal responsibility.

I say care, but let them fail.

A great professor of mine, the Medieval historian William A. Chaney, said that he knew a very smart student who did not put enough effort into his class and who earned a failing grade. Later, that student told Chaney that this was the best grade he had ever gotten because he knew that he had deserved it. His other professors had always given him passing grades despite his lack of effort, and Chaney's "F" had inspired him to take his education more seriously, to not continue to waste it and to begin to get more from the opportunity it provided. When another student mentioned to Chaney, in my presence, that he had also received a failing grade, Chaney told the student that he had probably earned it, and the student, now graduated and more detached, agreed. To Chaney, a higher grade was easy to give, an honest grade harder but kinder, both to the others whose good grades would mean less and to the student himself.

He found the strength to let them fail.

A student in one of my English composition classes once came to me to talk to me about the difficulties she was having with the assignments. I told her that I would be glad to work with her on her revisions and other papers, so long as she was willing to put forth the effort, but that, as much as I might want to simply change her grade, I had to hold her to standards that would prepare her for further college and professional work. In private conversation, she revealed with embarrassment that she had received an "A" in her previous section of college composition though she hadn't deserved it and everyone in the class with whom she had talked had received the same grade on their papers, which had no comments or corrections on them at all. She said that her high school teachers had done much of the same, handing out high grades in abundance and offering little feedback. Holding a rough draft that I had awarded a failing grade, and which we had discussed at length, she stared into my eyes as tears welled up in hers and she told me that I was the first teacher who had ever expected anything of her, who had ever challenged her, who she felt had really cared about her. She did very well in the class, thanking me profusely and telling me, as had my students as a whole, that she found writing "A" papers in her other classes easy because those same papers would earn a "B" or "C" from me. I told her that it was her attitude of being willing to learn, and appreciating the possibility of doing so, that deserved the praise and made all the difference.

I say have the kindness, and the courage, to let them fail.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

This column is five days early. But I haven't forgotten my promise to make up for the six weeks of this column's hiatus. I have been working on a five-part series of photo-intensive columns that I sincerely hope, for my sake as well as yours, will be done soon.

July 2002 statistics have been added to the usage page. PersianCaesar.com received 18,000 visits during the month of July and has received over 51,000 visits so far this year. Perhaps more importantly, the number of unique computers accessing this site more than doubled in July, rising to 9,445. If you care about "hits" (a fairly useless statistic, but one often cited on other websites), PersianCaesar.com received almost half a million in July. I'm flattered and extremely pleased at this, and I want to thank you, in all humility, for helping to make this website a success.

A budding art section has been created on A Stalker's Paradise. In addition to Julian Darius Self-Portraits, new pages have been added for CHILDHOOD, a photographic series of mine, Nude, a collection of my studies of figure and expirementation with its representation, and Formative Relics, a collection of relics from my early life.

As usual, a number of small updates have occurred within The Continuity Pages in general. A mini-site has been created for Wildstorm's Wildcats. Updates of particular note include the pages for JLA, Neil Gaiman, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and The Invisibles.

Your assignment for this week is to just to explore this site a bit more. There's a lot here, and I hope that you like it. Again, thanks for making persiancaesar.com and this column a success.