It's finally happened...

This is what occurs when counties let the Tea Party (bowel) movement run the show.

Many folks have long felt that a sign of society's ultimate ruin would have been kids having to attend school more than 5 days a week. I totally concur that this would wreck our nation, and I question even the intent behind it. I'm convinced that America's right-wing school systems want children in their grasp 100% of the time. If they could make kids live at the school and never be allowed off campus, they would.

I am absolutely, positively convinced that's what many of our educrats want. Not a shadow of a doubt in my mind.

There's good reasons why we don't tether schoolchildren to their desks 24/7. It's because kids are supposed to have lives. I'm going on 38, and the last thing I'd wish upon today's youth is the kind of all-consuming, study-all-night school life I once had. That's no life at all. Kids need time to live and grow. For several years, I didn't have that.

And now kids in northeastern Tennessee don't have it either.

The Unicoi County school system has decreed that school will be in session on several Saturdays. Neighboring Washington County quickly followed suit.

Their excuse? They say it's so more days can be crammed in before standardized testing (which is apparently their state religion too) begins.

Astonishingly, Unicoi County posted an 85% attendance rate on its first Saturday session. Why wasn't it 0%? If they pulled something like this in my day, students, parents, and teachers alike would be ripping the doors off the buildings. The fact they had 85% attendance just shows how much the schools have everybody bullied.

These are not forward-thinking school systems, obviously. Such an unfettered expansion of school time fails to teach kids how to creatively analyze.

Of all the bizarre ideas pushed by the right-wing establishment lately, most aren't likely to become law, so we often don't take the time to cover them here. But this idea of theirs - school 6 days a week - is already in force now in those 2 counties in Tennessee.

This is yet another illustration of how America's schools these days are almost completely unusable.