This will make your blood boil...

Here is a story from the Washington Post that is guaranteed to make your blood boil.

Avery Gagliano is a commanding young pianist who attacks Chopin with the focused diligence of a master craftsman and the grace of a ballet dancer.

The prodigy, who just turned 13, was one of 12 musicians selected from across the globe to play at a prestigious event in Munich last year and has won competitions and headlined with orchestras nationwide.

But to the D.C. public school system, the eighth-grader from Mount Pleasant is also a truant. Yes, you read that right. Avery’s amazing talent and straight-A grades at Alice Deal Middle School earned her no slack from school officials, despite her parents’ begging and pleading for an exception.

Here is the kind of talent we are talking about. This is a video of Avery playing Copland when she was ten years old:

You might draw all sorts of conclusions from this: these particular administrators are idiots and are sure to be overruled by a higher authority, Avery will be better off home-schooled anyway and so on. But I want to take it a bit further. You see, I think that this is a trend and it is one that is driven, not by mere idiocy, but by a managerial philosophy that ingrains fashionable ideas at the cost of common sense. As a commentator on a blog said the other day "Civilization is in decline because it is unfashionable to do the right thing."

This same kind of fashionable nonsense lies behind the Rotherham scandal in the UK where every single professional law enforcement officer and social services professional ignored and suppressed the evidence of massive child abuse for decades. Ordinary common sense is an easy guide in these matters, so there has to be a considerable amount of "education" or rather indoctrination to get this many otherwise intelligent people to act in such an evil way.

Going back to the case of Avery Gagliano, who certainly has nothing to learn from the folks in the DC public school system, we can see the absurd ideology at work in this email from the school:

“As I shared during our phone conversation this morning, DCPS is unable to excuse Avery’s absences due to her piano travels, performances, rehearsals, etc.,” Jemea Goso, attendance specialist with the school system’s Office of Youth Engagement, wrote in an e-mail to Avery’s parents, Drew Gagliano and Ying Lam, last year before she left to perform in Munich.

Jemea Goso is a highly-trained idiot who is simply incapable of recognizing that she is because she has been educated not to notice. Public schools are extremely well designed to protect the interests of those who run them and, as is obvious in this case, totally uninterested in the interests of the most brilliant talents in the student body.

Just one of the many benefits of music is its ability to separate the sheep from the goats. The talents of a really fine musician, like Avery Gagliano, show, in comparison, the complete absurdity of the school policy. Let's end with another performance of young Avery. Here she is with the Ravel Piano Concerto. If you want to skip the introduction, the performance starts at around the 3:45 mark:

Civilization is maintained by people like Avery Gagliano and destroyed by people with titles like "attendance specialist with the school system’s Office of Youth Engagement."