fred is one of my favorite writers and always has something to say in an interesting fashion; 

Life is hard in the column racket, I tell you. The work load is crushing.  Every week I get many hundreds of emails (well, OK, I would if I did, but this is close enough for journalism) asking, Fred, Fred, what beneficial and meritorious measures will you enact when you become dictator? What will you do to set the course of American society for centuries to come?

My first step as dictator will be to reform schooling: To this end  I will put a bounty on education theorists, no bag limit. Moreover, I will establish rental stalls where the  civic-minded can rent duck guns for the purpose. Next, I will have teachers colleges pumped full of linoleum cement. These places are the dark night of the mind. They turn perfectly good children into goobering phone-pecking mental blank slates who can barely read.

You may think that things are not as bad as they are. Ha. They are, and have been. Many years back, before the invention of fire, I wrote a piece for Harper’s on the black schools of  Washington. In ir I wrote this:

“The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers’ colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida (which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater), cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.’s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places........more.......