Michelle Malkin:

The presumption that children — and particularly inner-city children — can only be stimulated by the contemporary and familiar smacks of lazy elitism and latent racism. These educators, and I use that term as loosely as gangster rappers wear their pants, are clearly more interested in appearing cool than in inculcating a refined literary sense in students. Their aim is not enlightenment but dumbed-down ghetto entertainment. So that teachers and pupils can “relate” and be “down with that.” So they can “keep it real.” You know what I’m sayin’?

The schoolhouse rap peddlers disingenuously argue that Shakur’s puerile scribblings serve as useful tools to engage children in reading. Reading? Deciphering is more like it. Shakur’s volume, ”The Rose That Grew From Concrete,” looks more like a collection of cell phone text messages, teenage hieroglyphics and Backstreet Boys album titles than a collection of poems.

[...] Proclaiming his love “4 Jada,” Shakur pays gallant literary tribute to the object of his desire: “u bring me 2 climax without sex.”

Lord Byron, he wasn’t.

— Michelle Malkin in Townhall: 2 lazy 2 teach

Our tax dollars at work.

UPDATE: Baby say yeah… wait. Ja Rule sang that. Whatever. Miss Malkin is having fun.