The Greats Give Back
The Washington Post today takes note of a Manhattan Institute study exploring and deploring the decline in public schools named for Presidents and other Greats.
It’s all about the civic virtue, they claim. By Naming Names we ritually affirm the greats who’ve gone before and the superior system they represent, although the linkage of this with the surprising numbers of schools named for Millard Fillmore or James Buchanan unclear.
St. Louis boasts the McKinley Classical Junior Academy, “Home of the Goldbugs.” 
Their continued pressing down upon the brow of labor is to be admired, but what do they actually learn by it?
The Manhattanists claim to be puzzled more schools aren’t named for Martin Luther King what with all the multicuturalness and all. They seem disappointed they can’t beat that familiar dog once more.
That the Institute is a magnet for right wing oddities goes unmentioned in the Washington Post article. One leading light is Myron Magnet, a Martin Van Buren reenactor 
whose Big Idea is that hippie LSD consumption in the 60s led to those black folk signing up for welfare[“The Dream and the Nightmare]. The Washington Post laid out this crackpot’s influence on George Bush before the election in 2000, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.
