Leave it to our urban high school principals — those
stout-hearted, heroic figures, daily battling the forces of
ignorance and cynicism — to come up with a novel approach to solve
our nation’s public education woes. Yes, I said solve. As in,
there’s an app for that. Who would have thought it would be as easy
as
converting school libraries into coffee shops?
At first blush, this seems like a smart business
decision — clearing out all that stale inventory. Libraries, you
must agree, are notorious money pits. Hardcover books? Might as
well be saddled with a stockroom full of buggy
whips.
But why stop with the library? With a little more
outside-the-box thinking we can radically improve the bottom line.
The gymnasium, for instance, would make an ideal auto parts
warehouse. Plow that football field and put in alfalfa. So what if
Principal James McSwain’s idea sounds
disturbingly like a Marx Brothers’ film:
PROF. WAGSTAFF: Tomorrow we start tearing down the
college.
HORRIFIED PROFESSORS: But, Professor, where will the
students sleep?
PROF. WAGSTAFF: Where they always sleep. In the
classroom.
A high school classmate of mine had a similar idea
when he tried to turn Mr. Beine’s chemistry classroom into a meth
lab. I lost track of him after his expulsion and subsequent
incarceration, but he was obviously way ahead of his
time.
Eventually, the cold light of reality sinks in, and
you realize this is a high school library we’re talking about, and,
like museums and the American auto industry, it wasn’t designed to
turn a profit. Nor are the students supposed to learn anything
practical, like how to plant and harvest cash
crops.
Another thing. Maybe it’s not such a hot idea to
keep high school students hopped up on high doses of caffeine,
unless you really hate teachers, which a lot of people do because
teachers get summers off, while the rest of us are chained to our
desks year round. Besides, what was the point of the past twenty
years of sedating millions of students with Ritalin if you’re only
going to allow them to counteract their meds with a
stimulant?
TO BE FAIR, the principal did replace the library
books with 35 new laptop computers. That’s 35 laptops for some
3,000 students, which must make for lots of opportunities for
teachable moments. Today’s lesson: sharing. Well, not really
sharing, since as a practical matter, most of you will never come
close to using one of these laptops. Today’s lesson updated: doing
without…Oh, forget it. Just try not to kill each
other.
What, then, are the other 2,965 laptop-less students
supposed to do? Sure, some can update their Facebook status on
their Blackberrys. But we’re talking about an inner-city school,
and the administration won’t get around to purchasing 35
Blackberrys till they’ve finished throwing out all the test tubes
and Bunson burners.
It’s not entirely clear, but the idea here seems to be
that you can trick students into going to the library if you call
the library something else — like a coffee shop — and then fool
students even more by tossing out all the books and laying off the
librarians and actually turning the library into a coffee shop.
Boy, did we fool them kids! Suckers!
Or could the idea be that students simply will no longer
read anything unless it appears on a screen and can be whooshed
around with the swoosh of a finger? This, no doubt, explains the
sudden popularity among teenagers of thick Russian novel eBooks,
and is probably why my 17-year-old son and his formerly no-account
friends spend hours at a time glued to their iPhones. Most adults
assume they are texting their girlfriends, but in reality they are
perusing The Brothers Karamozov and Anna
Karenina, and all that thumb tapping is their way of
scribbling insightful notes in the margin.
Or, perhaps, the idea is that students regard books as
uncool, but haven’t yet made that association with computers, since
on laptops you can play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or watch
videos of cats playing ping-pong. (Let’s see a book do that!) So
anything on a laptop must be cool, even math homework. Yeah, we’ll
see how long that lasts.
Until I read this story, I had little hope for our
nation’s urban schools. Now I see we’ll be saved by innovative,
market-driven administrators utilizing the latest and most
expensive technology.
So go ahead and tear down the colleges. At this rate, we
won’t be needing them.
