Thursday, July 07, 2005

The range of American education

A post of Will Baude's begins, "My former T.A. Chad Golder along with Yale Law Prof Paul Gewirtz have an op-ed in today's New York Times." I have nothing to say about his post itself as I am not up to taking apart "judicial activism" at the moment or, arguably, at any moment, but the sentence makes me think of the things I'd have been able to say, re: my teachers' media presence, had I kept a blog during high school: "My former teacher was just shown on NY1 being taken out of the school in handcuffs." Or, more recently, "My high school principal was on NPR, telling the nation just how terrible the Stuyvesant teachers really are." Stuyvesant and Yale are both prestigious institutions (though Stuyvesant might be more "institution" than Yale), yet clearly what draws people to the two places is quite different. Oh well.

Can't really complain, though--for all the carting out of teachers and all the NY1-worthy scandals, how many other public high schools send out graduates who've read the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, not to mention who've done their darndest to read the Inferno but who, for reasons of adolescent distraction and general restlessness, never made it all the way through Dante's supposedly great work.

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