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Noah Webster Flunks the SAT

Noah-Webster-Flunks-SAT-Amber-FergusonLIVINGSTON, TX (DDP) – First President George Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers, who recently traveled through time when a fifth grader accidentally circumvented nature, met this weekend with the high school principal that is currently on death row in Texas for treating high school children like adults.

The Founders are on a tour to observe our generation and are frequently accompanied by a growing entourage of adoring groupies wearing buckled shoes and other Colonial-era clothing and accessories. The Depressed, along with most other major media outlets, have been chronicling their journey.

Although the statesmen were delayed in Texas, their first destination, when Benjamin Franklin was jailed for denouncing San Antonio’s new anti-discrimination ordinance, when the imprisoned principal finally met with the Founders, he explained that his crime against the state originally began because he thought high school students “rebelled” from due to their dislike of being treated the same as kindergartners.

As the statesmen peppered the prisoner with questions, the educator explained that, besides his crime of treating his students like young adults, he’d also tried to teach the students how to balance a checkbook, how to vote responsibly instead of selfishly, and how to properly prepare a resumé.

When Franklin asked what the students were learning instead of such common sense, the principal explained it was the Common Core. He then briefly outlined the SAT. That was when Franklin, who is gaining a reputation for being the most angry member of the angry group of returning Founding Fathers, launched into such a tirade of expletives that we had to delete his entire speech. Death row guards then ejected him from the premises.

Franklin immediately traveled back through time and returned with Noah Webster, dubbed “Father of American Scholarship and Education” by succeeding generations After the original educator met with the doomed high school principal, he announced that he was going to take the SAT to judge for himself what knowledge this generation of American high school graduates is expected to master.

Although the SAT organization does not release test results to the general public, when Webster received his failing scores soon thereafter, he had this to say to the Depressed in an exclusive telephone interview.

After strongly criticizing the SAT in general, he said, “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be aid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind.”

The Depressed has since learned that Webster failed to correctly answer a single algebraic question, although we are happy to report that he was kind enough to prepare a budget for our news organization shortly afterward. The Depressed is now able to meet its obligations for the first time in our history.

Webster also failed the grammatical section of the achievement test, due to the fact that, in colonial America, the statesmen often capitalized nouns for no discernable explanation, used commas seemingly at random, and did not believe that clauses beginning with which require a comma at the beginning of the phrase; in fact, although our Founding Fathers’ actual quotes frequently send the Depressed editors into near hysterics, nevertheless, we will continue to report the statesmen’s words verbatim.

Most surprising was the textbook pioneer’s failing score for the reading portion of the test. When asked to comment on the issue, he said, “SAT is thus an exam that does stand on its head! I did carefully peruse each essay, and was left with no doubt I could thereby answer any queries regarding each piece with intelligence.

“Yet, the very questions themselves failed to inquire if I understood that which I had read. Rather, they were but to test if I did understand the author’s intent.

“Kind friend, graduates of this very generation are educated not to think for themselves, only thus to remember what they are told!”

Although the Depressed failed to understand Webster’s explanation, we then asked him if there was anything the current public education system needed to change.

He said, “We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We’re starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools… We’ve become accustomed of late of putting little books into the hands of children containing fables and moral lessons… We are spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principle text in our schools… The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other manmade book.

Should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a schoolbook? Its morals are pure, its examples are captivating and noble… The reverence for the sacred book that is thus early impressed lasts long; and, probably, if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind… .

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of the creation to the Creator himself, they stop short, and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. ”

After pausing for a moment, he added, “Man [has] become…what the theory of atheism declares him to be-a companion for brutes.

© Amber Ferguson

This blog is solely a product of the author’s imagination. It is a spoof. It is fiction. It did not happen and is meant for entertainment purposes only. Please see the It’s a Spoof Page for more information.

For a timeline of “religion” in American public schools, see here.