Bring Back Mr. Gradgrind

Mr. Gradgrind, for those of you with a literary bent, was the oh-so literal-minded teacher in Dickens's Hard Times, who knew only facts, and saw his students as vessels to be filled with facts. Okay, we do a little better than that in some ways, nowadays, although we could do and have done a lot worse, too. But what I want to bring back is Mr. Gradgrind's discipline.

This fall, I'll be working 35 hours a week, while taking 12 hours of MBA courses (GPA 3.70), and working a 10-hour GTA position to pay for it. The further ahead I can get on my reading, the better. After three weeks of a chapter a day, I'm almost done with the textbook reading (although not the case studies) for the organizational management class. (Unaccountably called High-Performance Management, it's being taught by the local Reconstructionist Rabbi.) I drove to the local park on my lunch hour to enjoy the slowly-cooling weather, and finish off the textbook. Little did I know that the local high school was nearby.

Apparently, all sorts of people can go off-campus nowadays. Twenty years ago may sound like a long time, but mine was the second class allowed to go off-campus from my high school. During lunch only, and only for seniors. Some sort of slippery-slope logic has taken hold, and now it seems that pretty much everyone can go off campus during lunch.

Do you want to know what high school kids do off-campus during lunch (which also seems to extend will into mid-afternoon)? They screech tires, do pot, endanger other cars, and show off for the girls. This could only come as a surprise to someone with the naivete of the Clinton Administration foreign policy team. Principal Skinner is probably just happy they're out destroying the city infrastructure instead of his school. How on earth could anyone think that giving this sort of unsupervised time, and access to heavy machinery, to what amounts to oversized children with typhoon-like hormones could possibly be a good idea? Most of the time, they're not going to cause any harm, at least not on purpose. But do you think they're going to leave a note when they do?

We have so little discipline in schools, starting from grade school, that the kids end up running the asylum from about 3rd grade on up. Any sort of leeway is going to be so hard to enforce that the school administrators will always find it easier to appease the cute little tykes. You start out letting them cross the street to McDonald's for lunch and end up by including the nearest rent-by-the-hour motel in the student activity fee. Kids should be in school. They should have lunch in school. If they're going to do pot and have sex, well, why else are we spending all that property tax money on perfectly good bleachers?

At least I know my car will be safe, and the park will be quiet.