Education in Oklahoma is a funny joke that the state cannot afford to tell. We could save some time by avoiding the pledge of allegiance and whatever that weird Oklahoma prayer might be called. Learning is the idea. Norman is the seat of the University of Oklahoma. Summer Boismier shared a QR code to a public library in New York City and her career was ruined by Norman Public Schools, a district that could have simply blocked the URL without even calling Ms. Boismier in for a meeting. Every teacher brings something different to the classroom. Holly Nevels herself taught the helping verbs by song.

Let me tell you about four of my experiences with school board meetings, in chronological order. In the first meeting, I went to the board of Norman Public Schools with another debater from the debate team of Norman High School and spoke about how it was inequitable for Norman Public Schools to designate the Norman High School home-team bleachers for Norman North in a crosstown rivalry football game. They interrupted my speech shortly after I began speaking. In the second meeting, I went to Norman Public Schools in a suit and tie, signed up to speak about Bible debate, gave a speech when called on, and stayed until the end of the meeting; Norman Public Schools sent the Norman Police Department a-knocking on the subsequent day to unlawfully ban me from their administrative Joe Siano building where they pretend their meetings conform to the Oklahoma Open Meeting Act. In the third meeting, I went to the Oklahoma State Department of Education, spoke shame on the name of Solomon, professed that the ceremony whereby Israel ceded the Alma oil field to Egypt is related to a descended Star of David in the Book of Revelation, talked about how Cyrus established peace between Israel and Egypt in 1979, said that the Secretary of State of the United States resigned because of something related to destroyers in the Persian Gulf and Revelation 9, and mentioned Abadan, a passthrough for petroleum that is brought out of the pit and delivered to ships upon the Persian Gulf; nobody interrupted me and Ryan Walters gestured that I could continue speaking if I so desired. The fourth meeting was again at the offices of OSDE, and I noticed that one woman on the board made a very vapid and time-waster comment thanking teachers who were not present for the meeting and using them as a means to seem Oklahoma Business Pretty in the meeting; to my knowledge, she did not send the police to my residence on the subsequent day. There is a serious problem if people like Ryan Walters who teach the truth about a famous letter to some Danbury Baptists are shouted down at their own meetings but a local school board brings children to recite the pledge of allegiance and bans adults who went to the same elementary school as the kids.

Oklahoma is like a tree with some good fruit and some rotten fruit that has dried on the branch. If you shake the tree, the big juicy fruit may fall, but the fruit of no real value may have already dried to such a degree that it stays with the branch. That is what the situation with our students has become. Some of them leave Oklahoma and choose to remain away from this state. They are the fruit that is fit for market. It is not enough to shake the branches and take the good fruit as it falls. Something is obviously wrong with the tree itself. There are different kinds of school districts in Oklahoma. Norman is a clear example of a district where a public library and the concept of debate are despised by the people who run things. I don’t have a firearm. The cops carry them. People here are not sanitizing their institutions. That is the starting point for a better educational outcome. It feels like I left this state for a while and people started lying to each other and hating each other when it comes to basic decisions like how to teach the ABCs and trigonometry. The bibles-in-classes debate is a litmus test for whether you care about kids enough to give them a bible, and whether you care about decency enough to avoid opening it in class and talking about Tamar deceiving Judah into having sex with her as a prostitute for the price of a goat. That is in Genesis 38, after Judah’s son chose to let his semen spill on the ground instead of letting Tamar — the wife of his dead brother — have a chance to get pregnant with his seed. This is what we are debating in Oklahoma: whether anyone actually cares about the law.