DMC 7 – Dumb Kids

Here is the seventh Detroit Mock City created for the Cartoonist Studio contest.  Click on the image to view the full size.

Making fun of kids, or bad education systems, is touchy stuff.  I know it, and I think it’s good to be careful when discussing it.

So we were careful with what we said and how we chose to depict it in this comic.  In fact I made the decision to change the middle panel slightly from what we had written, though that was mostly for aesthetic reasons.  BTW, this one looks damn good, doesn’t it?  Once again I got a shocked reaction when my wife saw how well I drew the Asian girl.

Speaking of, if you didn’t know, Japanese students kill themselves…a lot.  This looks at the year of 2006, when suicides in Japan topped 30,000 for the ninth consecutive year, 886 of those being students.  Here is an interesting article talking about the facts and myths of the Japanese student suicide rate.  BTW, it follows up that 2009 marked the twelfth year the suicide rate stayed above 30,000.  So it’s not just students, it’s all of Japan.  This article blames bullying in schools.

So for whatever reason, stress, bullying, lack of individuality, rigid culture, whatever, they like to off themselves in the land of the rising sun.

In other news, the public schools in Detroit are bad.  Check out BigGovernment.com which declares Detroit public schools to be an epic failure.  Why so bad?  Staggering dropout rates, functionally-illiterate high school graduates, a dysfunctional school board and a sea of red ink.

New Detroit looks at the ethnic disparity in educational success.  Crain’s Detroit discusses Detroit recently showing the worst National test scores ever recorded.

So I think it’s safe to say, the Detroit public school system has some pretty severe problems.

Depressing.  Well, hope you enjoyed the comic!