The Simple Mandarins: A Parable of Singular Transparency

The Simple Mandarins: A Parable of Singular Transparency
by Judy Lightfoot

It happens on the cusp of the Electronic Century. The best and brightest American educators, parents, and public leaders become convinced that the same marvelous technology systems installed in the offices and homes of our fast-paced global marketplace should be wired into classrooms around the nation – and soon the Simple Mandarins™ are born.

Simple Mandarins™ improve student learning in every subject and skill, at every grade level!
With Simple Mandarins™, students are neater, more efficient, and better organized!
Students who use Simple Mandarins™ are just a click away from vast amounts of information!
With Simple Mandarins™, students of all ages make presentations that would dazzle a CEO!
Students focus on their projects longer because Simple Mandarins™ appeal to 5 of the 8 Intelligences (Logical-Verbal, Tactile, Musical, Visual-Spatial, Emotional) and to 17 of the 26 Learning Styles!
Simple Mandarins™ prepare students for work in “the real world!”
Lap-size portables enable “Learning On the Run!”©
Truly, “Simple Mandarins™ Do The Ten Thousand Things!”©

And so it is that every American school with enough funds for Simple Mandarins™, or with a donation from a company wishing to offer more children the opportunity of becoming dependent on them, installs the wonderful new cutting-edge technologies that usually work. Some schools can also afford to hire a Simple Mandarin™ Resource Person for every hundred faculty members, although the SMRPs have no experience as classroom teachers and do not know which Simple Mandarin™ features might be best for teaching what aspects of which subjects. Never mind! Simple Mandarins™ Do The Ten Thousand Things© and are essential for students who will live and work in the Electronic Century, and so the SMRPs hold night classes for teachers on using Potent Painter™, building Tao Jones™ web pages, transcending viruses, formatting tables and Transparent-Mind Windows™, and exiting no-exit XXX-rated sites mysteriously opened by academic search strings.

Not all teachers believe that these workshops will help them teach their subjects. Some history teachers ask, “Should children focus on the rapid collection and colorful delivery of information or on thinking critically about it?” Some English teachers ask, “Should children become organized, efficient, and neat, or should they get interested in mysteries and muddles, seek more than one answer, and write boldly exploratory if sometimes chaotic rough drafts?” Some science teachers ask, “Are children who work longer on projects with Simple Mandarins™ gripped by the moves in their minds and in the material or by the shifts in image and format that they can cause with their borderline-autistic repetition of small-motor manipulations?”

And so school administrators come to believe that some of their teachers are Enlightened and some are Not. Anyone who wonders aloud whether Simple Mandarins™ will really help persuade students to ask further questions instead of making up their minds like little beds that will never get slept in again is sent for instruction in the Ten Thousand Things© to the Senior Mandarins of International Technology Education, whose annual conference is said to be the planet’s largest and most worthy program of seminars and workshops on the subject. Some teachers ask: “Why does the conference website seem to be touting a trade fair where Simple Mandarin™ products and consultants can be sold to a vast, possibly miserable and demoralized captive audience smarmed as ‘the best and brightest educators today’?” Teachers who ask these kinds of questions are so slow to understand the wisdom that Simple Mandarin™ marketers and education experts have acquired by sitting together at the feet of the Wise Guru that they must be sent repeatedly to SMITE©.

And so in schools around the nation, although technical problems interrupt instruction Ten Thousand Times, teachers begin using Simple Mandarins™ in their classes. Enlightened teachers are happy, and so are all the teachers incapable of holding the interest of anyone younger than seventy-two – they decide to teach their subjects entirely with the help of what they call, in privately humorous tones, “S-M.” The teachers who lack enlightenment meditate on forbidden mysteries such as “Which of The Ten Thousand Things© that Simple Mandarins™ Do© will help children develop their minds in my class and which Things© are a total waste of time?” But even a technofogey can master Simple Mandarin Potent Painter™ and use it daily to avoid being sent for another summer session at SMITE©.

True liberation is achieved by school administrators across America, who have time to visit electronically enlightened institutions in Amsterdam, Kyoto, Cairo, Bombay, and Sydney because, with or without their guidance, their teachers will get important Things© done. Simple Mandarins™ Do The Ten Thousand Things!©

Meanwhile, the children have been happy from the start. They were already masters of Simple Mandarins™, because they opened their minds to S-M™© Video Games long ago and never had to mark Ten Thousand Essays and Tests. Now they organize their schoolwork efficiently. They get their papers done quickly, neatly, and correctly. They collect stupendous amounts of data and present it in clearly bulleted outlines with clever Potent Painter™ touches. And they are not shooting each other.

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