And this one is breathlessly stupid:
Students in North Carolina’s private and public colleges would be required to mentor public school-age children to receive a bachelor’s degree after 2012, under a bill filed this week.
Sen. Tony Rand, D-Cumberland, named the proposed community service program in memory of two college students who were shot to death earlier this year – Eve Carson, the student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Abhijit Mahato, a Duke University graduate student.
The bill would require any student seeking a bachelor’s degree to spend 20 hours per semester mentoring and tutoring a public school-age child. The bill doesn’t specify for how many semesters the mentoring would be required.
The requirement would apply to private schools because it would be linked to grants that these colleges already receive from the state to help teach students who live in North Carolina.
Rand said Wednesday that the program would help at-risk youth because college students can set a good example for children.
Rand, of course, has no research to back up such a cockeyed assertion. He has his good intentions, and he has his hammer of state power, and that apparently suffices.
Carson and Mahato’s deaths were imminently preventable tragedies, but not because their killers didn’t have some college English major to look up to, but because they were allowed to be walking free, not even worrying about checking in with their parole officer, despite a long record of proven danger to society. The criminal-justice system failed Carson and Mahato; that is where to start with legislation. Bringing about the societal and parental changes that would prevent additional monsters from being created, however, is far outside the scope of legislation.
I’d really like to see Rand try telling parents of just one college girl why she needs to spend 20 hours a semester with prospective dropouts and juvenile delinquents in order to stop them from becoming killers of college girls.
