In love with Benico Del Toro. As you suggest, it is immensely disconcerting to find that the public takes for sacred the practice of herding young people into boxes, segregating them by age, squelching their natural instincts and inducting them into a bland but dangerously false, ersatz liberal vision of social and political reality. The practice of production-line public education really is perverse. Education need have little to do with schools.
Age segregation is arbitrary, educationally retarding and socially disfiguring.
And the increasingly authoritarian culture of the schools can do little but exacerbate the discontent of young men already chafing against the bars of compulsory detainment. The issue is among the most serious facing society today. You are spot-on to recommend that school be made entirely voluntary after 14. This is not just a practical issue about what to do about kids that go bad, but a moral issue about the lost rights of young adults. Read last week's responses to the same column Print story E-mail story Children used to be financial resources for their families and were expected to work.