Sending 7th and 8th graders out to building trail (RL48)
Supertrain Junior High
No-one learns anything in Junior High. Nothing will be taught and nothing will be permitted to be learned. Not a single useful piece of information is communicated or retained during that time! Learning anything in this un-learning-able environment is impossible. You will come to Junior High as an empty vessel and you will leave potentially even more empty than how you came in. As a national program, kids in 7th and 8th grades of Supertrain Junior High will instead be building trail in National Parks! We have a lot of national parks and a lot of trails are in need of a tremendous amount of upkeep. Going up there, hauling logs and fixing that trail is a lot of work. Some of the locations are treacherous for older people, but in particular 7th and 8th graders who are incapable of learning anything and who are useless to society in any other way are just old enough for dragging logs. They should be employed as donkeys throughout our national park system.
In 6th grade you are still engaged and you are still learning stuff. You learn about art, music, and all the bones in the body, but as you graduate from 6th grade, you are immediately sent to a Works Progress Administration style camp on the side of Mount Rainier, out in Death Valley, California or wherever it is that trail needs to be built. You will be employed in this capacity for two straight years and you will come out the other side with clear skin, a clear sense of purpose and a strong body. Your youth will have been employed in the service of our great country and you enter 9th grade to learn things from books again.
Useless young people
These kids will all sleep like babies at night in their depression-era bunkhouses. They will be allowed to read for 30 minutes by lantern light and on weekends, someone might tell them a ghost story. They will be contributing to America in a way that there is no substitute for! 7th and 8th graders are terrible people. Right now we are placating them. They are dressing like Bratz dolls, they are listening to Hip Hop music and they are joining gangs or whatever it is that young people do these days. They are wearing white Veneers like they are being Lolitas for their next door neighbors. They are causing problems for their families and they have terrible skin.
The primary problem of middle school is the terrible bell curves of differences. When you are building trail, there is work for everybody. You want to be an artist? Here is a sign, here is a little wood-carving kit. This sign needs to say ”The upper loop is 2.4 km, the lower loop is 1.8 km”, now get busy on the sign! To each their ability!
Merlin’s 4 year-old daughter had half a day off school and went directly to ballet afterwards where Merlin joined her. She tore ass in ballet for 45 minutes although she had already been running at school, which she mostly does with a scarf. When it is time for bed, she will be good and tired. Part of the problem is that we are not tiring out our children enough! It is like Gibson (a Borzoi dog): He could only be happier if the world would allow him to be exhausted. When is the last time Gibson was satisfyingly exhausted? If there were rabbits who needed to be chased, he would have a job and find his duck. There are perfectly healthy adult people on treadmills, elliptical machines and stationary bicycles everywhere. They are creating heat which needs to be dissipated through air-conditioning and fans instead of using that heat to power their buildings or to lift logs. They are just burning food!
Critical reception
After launching this mandatory program for all kids, you are going to hear from the people who think that their kid is a special little flower, and from the people who are homeschooling their people and who believe that God made the universe in 4,5 days. Every kid is a fucking special flower in this country and what you need is somebody with the will to say that your kids are stupid useless little fucks just like every other kid, and they need to be yoked to a water-wheel. Kids want limits, they just don’t know it!
Leading the right path
During the first three weeks, there will be a lot of crying, whimpering and whining. The kids will be asking for their PlayStation, but your reply will be ”Lights out in 15 minutes!” At first they will be rapping and talking to each other in their youthful patois, but by the end of the first year they will all be speaking like Walt Whitman. They will have woodsman skills and they will be so strong! They will stare into the distance and they seem wiser than they were. When 9th grade comes around, they will open their books with their pencils at the ready, hungry for lessons in US history!
When they start at their first month at the national park, their pants would still be hanging down so you could see their underpants, but the first time a Wolverine comes out of the woods, they will realize that they are not on some Downtown thing and they will pull their fucking pants up and weave a belt out of rope. The entirety of their medical kit will be a tin-can full of baby-powder and a little bit of hydrogen peroxide that they will find at the end of every one of the bunkhouses. You want to go to violin camp? We worry about that when you come back from the trail!
There are not even 5 examples of anybody who has done anything useful to society at that age, maybe Mozart, but he could have made some trail, too! It is debatable whether Rambaud actually helped or hurt the progression of society, but he is in the class of exceptions because he was able to write some books and he ruined some people’s lives. He could have done his writing during the 15 minutes at the end of each day on his yellow legal pad they would have handed him. Every kid will get a legal pad and a gold pencil to keep in their footlocker. They can write their memoirs or they can write teary letters to home. After the first month or two, those teary letters will stop and the kids will start writing letters like ”Dear Mother and Father, today we summited Mount Adams and improved the trail while we were there. Love, your son Shanequa”.
Merlin thinks that this project should require a lot of awkward sharing and constant uncertainty. If you want continuity in your life, enjoy 9th grade. You should gaslight the shit out of these kids! John thinks that sounds a lot like Terrordome, but if we want to get good solid work out of these kids, we should not terrorize them. The extend of media will be 16 mm films that were produced between 1950 and 1965, for example about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack or the dangers of marijuana. There will be no electricity except from a coal-burning generator or maybe from Tyler Heraclitus on a treadmill that he had to make out of chutt (?). The kids will learn ganking and how to stab a fish.
Getting kids into the program
All of a sudden, John feels like Paul Shaffer. Merlin is giving these young people too much credit, because in 6th grade, most minds are still malleable enough that you can create an entire reality in which the idea of escape does not even occur to them. This will be their new life! During the first month they are trying to make it over the wire to get back to their Bratz dolls. There will be fun activities at first, like jumping into the mud or making a bed out of straw, but a lot of people will be grousing. The food will be pretty good at first and it will not be like a boot camp in the military where they try and break you, but it will be a free and fun summer camp. Come and have some fun! Get outdoors and have some fresh air! It is going to be good for the kids as a weight reducer and it will help them if they are depressed, have ADD or Asperger. These camps will nurture our children with very organic food! After a certain time, they will be getting out for the log toss, the log carry, or the log drag.
Outlook
Until people in our culture and society embrace what this is bringing to our wider Weltanschauung, this plan will remain a void. Our national parks are actually very fun! When you are in 9th grade you will bring your parents there and show them the zip-line you built and you will show them your report about William Henry Harrison that you have written by lamp-light. He was the 30-day president, the Pope John Paul I of American Presidents. Back in Cincinnati, Ohio, Merlin’s friends went to William Henry Harrison High School for a month before they were killed.