The flaws of Dr. Benedict's Evil Plan.
The villain of this film, Dr. Phillium Benedict, wants to abolish recess in order for test grades to improve. When his stints as principal of Third Street School and Secretary of Education didn't work out, his ultimate solution was to move the moon's orbit with a tractor beam, hereby changing summer into winter, and thus removing summer vacation. Dr. Benedict hopes that forcing kids to study by removing summer would make him President of the United States. However, his plan is simply too complicated to actually work. Let's break it down in chains of events and how they could go wrong:- Moving the moon would cause such a dramatic climate shift that it would likely wipe out humanity at least and all other animal and plant life on Earth at most.
- If he succeeded in just making it winter all year long, the entire northern hemisphere's soil would become completely infertile, causing rampant starvation and the worst global economic recession in all of history. And test scores would be the least of everyone's concerns because the education system would collapse as well.
- And if changing the seasons just amounted to being nothing more than a palette swap, the existence of a long vacation in the school year is not dependent on the seasons (which is precisely T.J.'s argument against Dr. Benedict's mad plan in the film).
- And then, if all the above somehow still managed to go exactly as planned, the increase in the number of school days would have the exact opposite effect as children become exhausted and unmotivated from extremely long stretches of study without the reward of vacation to condition them.
- Not to mention the fact that the other countries that have better test scores have those not because of a lack of summer vacation (Canada, Iceland, and Norway DO have those), but for a variety of reasons that he seems to have ignored, such as how they are taught in the first place.
In short, the Big Bad's plan is so poorly thought out that every single step completely undermines the chance of each following step to succeed.
