School Days...

Ruins of a Vanished Civilization , Aztec, New Mexico.

I was out walking yesterday morning at about seven-thirty--it gets so hot so early here in Redding, CA, that if you don't walk early you don't walk at all because the temperature is soon over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit--anyway I was out fairly early and school has started again or I probably wouldn't have noticed anything--BUT...

We live near a high school.

Now I know high schools. I have worked at them a lot over the years as a teacher--and I attended one many years ago and I know that they don't change very much. You might say they resist change as much as any bedrock bureaucracy you can think of and I think you'd be about right.

Anyway--the street corner where I walk across without hardly pausing when school is out was a flood of automobiles--a river of steel, glass, plastic, rubber and everything else that cars are--barely pausing at the "stop" sign for a pathetic pedestrian--me--to hastily cross.

"WHAT A WASTE!" I thought.

"MAN! What a waste!"

I suddenly thought of all the other high schools across this broad land with all their highly automobilized young patrons all forming a vast stampeding herd of lemming-like consumers on their way to and from school--wasting resources just as fast as they can--and I felt more than slightly sick.

Especially because I know VERY, VERY well that almost ALL of these young people have absolutely NO interest in attending ANY school on ANY day and that what they will learn at their high school is probably not worth knowing anyway!

It is ALL a colossal WASTE!

Now here is a suggestion that NONE of you will like and that will NEVER become reality:

Only conduct high school classes one or two days a week--and only allow young people who prove by their attitude and their scholarship that they will profit from attending classes to be students at these public schools.

See what I mean!

You don't like the idea do you??!

I thought not!

It is NOT what you remember from your high school days--and it is NOT what your parents or grandparents remember from their high school school-days!

But, don't you know--things HAVE changed!

As a global warming expert said yesterday as he described the drowning of polar bears trying to reach northern ice bergs--"We have reached the tipping point!"

In other words: Things will NOT return to normal!

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