Underfunded School Budget Cuts

“With our current budget, the past tense must unfortunately a thing of the past.” (258) Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from Language Programs is an article from The Onion that jests at the common and ridiculous budget cuts schools are presenting day to day. In summary, the article is about a fake school cutting past tense from the school’s program. They deploy high humor to create a visual truth about how these budget cuts are chopping down our children’s education. The text mostly consists of wordplay and irony to create chuckles from the readers while simultaneously achieving the goal of sending a message of our schools’ budget to the public. High comedy is created and deployed in this article through puns and irony to hide the moral or universal truth hidden within the topic. Firstly, within the article puns, or wordplay, is frequently used to smooth down the moral of the script. Several accounts can easily be comprehended throughout the text to keep the reader interested. An example would be, “...until we were forced to drop history class and social studies a couple of months ago.” (258) This quote from the text shows how they plan to eliminate the past completely, which is seen as absurd to any
To illustrate, “...remove ‘ed’ endings from all of the state’s English classrooms, saving struggling schools an estimated three million dollars each year.” (258) and “Much like art and music, the past tense provides students with a unique and consistent outlet for self-expression.” (258) Both of these quotes pulled from the text hint at the idea that so many needed programs as regularly cut to save money, such as music and art. To wrap it up, the universal truth is that budget cuts are tearing apart our children’s education and will soon tear it down to