Your article on the ills of education as provided in our country today is the clearest and most insightful one I have read on the subject. Upon retirement, I decided to substitute teach at local high schools (Haddon Heights, N.J.), partly to have something to do but mostly because of support for education and an interest in it.

The reality is that high schools, as I have come to view them, are half play pen, half indoctrination camp. The text themselves are replete with errors and propaganda, though the math ones are clearer than when I went to high school. Insolence and barbarism are suffered more by the staff today than of yore, and I teach at some of the better local high schools. High compliments on your truthfulness about the education pit.

-- Don Howard

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You are absolutely right. Working with one's hands and or in nature gives one a sense of accomplishment and contentment. The ones today who benefit from these skills are the new immigrants. Kids three to four generations removed from arrival look down at these professions, except in Europe where everyone is thought of as a contributor.

My idea is to start in school and offer landscaping, painting, plumbing, machine repair, etc. With adult guidance, students could take care of the physical plant they attend and learn a skill that could provide self-esteem and income down the road. Don't wait until high school -- that's too late. Earlier, sixth or seventh grade, before we lose their attention. Then of course they must learn to read, hopefully before they reach school age, so they enjoy the pleasure later in life and not struggle all through school, if they don't drop out.

-- Barrie Heathcote, Lodi, Calif.

You're damn right, Camille. While working as a newspaper reporter in an upscale town in Massachusetts, I watched town officials complain about the high cost of sending students to the regional vocational school. The hostility toward the school, its administrators and its mission was palpable because it took funds away from the local school system, which was designed to shoehorn kids into college regardless of their desire or talent.

When the finance committee and school committee talked about education, nothing was too good for the local schools, but the vocational school was regarded as a red-headed stepchild by the adults who ran the town. And the kids who went to the school were regarded as borderline retarded by their peers, just as they were in the town where I grew up.

Admittedly, the per-pupil costs at vocational schools are higher, because teaching kids to be mechanics or electricians takes more equipment than preparing students for another few years of school, but the kids who graduate from voke schools became taxpayers upon graduation.

Eventually, I spent a day with a local student while he went to classes at the vocational school. I was impressed with the school and the student's honest assessment about his prospects and what he wanted to do for a living as an adult. He wasn't stupid, but he knew he didn't want to spend another four years in the classroom. He was working as a mechanic outside of school and making decent money.

I didn't see any hint of teen angst or alienation in the kid, which isn't surprising, given that he had such a realistic, doable and productive future in front of him.

-- Dexter Van Zile, Brighton, Mass.

Thanks for your great comments about how useless and destructive high schools are. Some of the home school movement has been fueled by parents who can't bear to see their kids in such a situation.

I think another reason for the hopelessness and desperation of teenagers is that from their earliest years they have been taught that the world is a terrible place. Environmental problems will bring the world to an end unless they personally save it. There are no heroes to inspire them -- Washington was a white elitist slaveholder, Lincoln a homosexual, manic-depressive racist, Jefferson an exploiter of his female slave. No heroic virtues are ever held up as worthy of emulation.

Natural impulses of each sex are stifled -- boys cannot learn to defend their families or their country, girls cannot long for motherhood. I know how I feel when I have to listen to patently false statements by ignorant people, and have no opportunity to refute them (like listening to Dick Gephardt, for example) -- enraged and depressed. Teenagers have that experience all day long -- hearing politically correct things they know in their hearts are false.

-- Judy Warner

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