Milli Vanilli and a Quest for Smarts

List me among those who cheer the end of the no-fail rule in the L.A. Unified School system. It means enhancement of what American education has come to represent. A kid too dumb to learn can still be a football star.

Let’s face it, who cares if you’ve ever read “Finnegans Wake” when you can run like a cheetah and tackle like a gorilla?

The boy who doesn’t, I mean don’t, know Thomas Jefferson from Milli Vanilli could be hauling down $2 million a year for the Dallas Cowboys someday while a full professor of history is still scratching by on about 1/40th that amount.

It’s this way. For the past seven years, students who received one failing grade were not allowed to participate in extracurricular activities. Last Monday, the L.A. School Board reversed itself and did away with that rule.

Part of the board’s thinking was that if a kid isn’t allowed to play football, he isn’t going to stay in school at all, sports and sex having been the only reasons he was there in the first place.

Now, of course, as long as he can tie his own shoes and find his way to the locker room, he’s a shoo-in for a diploma and pretty well off for erotic achievement, too.

Everyone loves a football hero.

His only academic requirement will be an ability to distinguish between an “O” and an “X” in order to understand the plays on a blackboard and to tell the difference between their guys and our guys on the old gridiron.

Well, yes, he’s expected to maintain a “C” average overall, but I’m sure that rule will also be eliminated as schools become what God intended them to be, a place to teach sports.

Anyone who goes to class more than once a week will be considered a scholar.

The main purpose in life, you see, is to get by.

Getting by requires no great knowledge and no special ability to think, reason or otherwise tax one’s mental capacity to the max.

Our heroes are people who find it difficult to stay either sober or honest and who can barely articulate their own names.

Why ask more from a population of high school students who find those limitations perfectly adequate in the ones they idolize?

After the board voted to eliminate the no-fail rule, I interviewed a half-dozen students to ask what they thought about the decision.

One interview, that with a young man across the street from Canoga High, stands out.

Our conversation went something like this, using forms of the word “go” to represent “said,” which was the vernacular of his choice:

I go, “What do you think of the ruling on extracurricular activities?”

He goes, “What do you mean?”

I go, “What part is it you don’t understand?”

“Extracumulus, or whatever.”

I go, “The word is extracurricular.”

He shrugs and goes, “So?”

“That means things you do in addition to your other school work,” I go. “Like participating in sports.”

“It’s no big deal,” he goes. “I’m too busy gettin’ ready for college.”

“You’re going to college?” I go, astonished.

He goes, “Cal State.”

I go “wow” and go.

As I thought about it, not knowing the definition of a big word like ex-tra-cur-ric-cu-lar shouldn’t interfere with no college education.

In a test recently, undergraduates at Northridge and Fullerton revealed that many thought Desmond Tutu was a ballerina and that Mikhail Gorbachev had starred in television’s old “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” series.

In similar flashes of lumpishness, nine out of 14 students couldn’t name the U.S. secretary of state, but 13 out of 14 knew that a California teen-ager wasn’t chosen for her high school cheerleader squad because her breasts were too large.

Actor-author-thinker Steve Allen, in his latest book “Dumbth,” tells of a test among students at Purdue University in which these nations were named as being in Central America: Liberia, Burma, Nepal, Nigeria, the Philippines, Iceland and Vietnam.

Well, if they’re not, they ought to be.

One of those who voted against dropping the no-fail rule was school board member Rita Walters, who so often fights a lonely battle on a board noted more for its opacity than its sagacity.

She worries about “a rising tide of mediocrity” in our schools that puts the nation at risk.

While students from other countries achieve, ours falter. “We’re expecting less,” Walters said, “and we’re getting less.”

Learning isn’t easy. Communicating what we know is even more difficult. Aristotle had words for it 400 years before the birth of Christ.

He goes, “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

Aristotle? Just a guy.