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[reggie@pdn.paradyne.com (George Leach): ]

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Date:    Mon, 24 Sep 90 10:28:00 -0400 
From:    reggie@pdn.paradyne.com (George Leach)

         Here is something that I clipped out of the editorial section of
the St Pete Times last week:

		``Dan Quayle speaks his mind''

     When Dan Quayle talks about the decline of the American educational
system, people listen.  The vice president has demonstrated that he is
something of an expert on the subject.

     In fact, Quayle often sounds as if he's running for the job of national
poster boy for academic deprivation.

     Until this week, the vice president's most noteworthy comments on the
issue came during an address to the United Negro College Fund, whose motto is
``A mind is a terrible thing to waste.''  As if to prove the point, Quayle
left his audience with these words: ``...What a waste it is to lose one's mind,
or not to have a mind...How true that is.''

     It's equally true, as the vice president said during a question-and-answer
session this week, that, ``As a matter of fact, teachers are the only professio
n
that teaches our kids.''

     This unarguable observation came at the end of a speech to the Hudson
Institute, an Indian-based right-wing think tank.  Comparing public educators
to pre-perestroika Soviet communists, the vice president supported what he
called a ``free-market'' educational system in which parents are able to
cross district lines to choose the public schools their children will attend.

     Quayle, whose own kids happen to attend private schools, gave no indicatio
n
that he has paid any mind to the potential damage that such programs do to the
time-honored concept of equal educational opportunity for all public school
students.  After all, as Quayle might say, ``A mind is a terrible thing to
pay.''

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