Due to a technicality, a bunch of kids are about to lose a month of summer: 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090616/ap_on_re_us/us_odd_school_s_not_out

Though these kids only missed about an hour of school, and despite the fact that California can barely afford to keep any of its schools open, period, those whacky California bureaucrats have decided to punish the students of Dickson and Rolling Ridge ELEMENTARY schools due to a clerical error. I pray that each and every one of their parents loads those kids onto a bus and hops the border to Mexico rather than indulge in this nonsense. They're kids. They need the beach. Do the school administrators not understand what torture this is for the little tykes? Seriously, just give them all spankings and send them on their way -- anything is better than an unexpected thirty days of extra school (imagine the joy of one snow day, multiply that by thirty, and then multiply that by -1). 

Actually, I've been rethinking my relationship to education recently. It all started when I read that Bryce Harper, the sixteen-year-old baseball prodigy, is dropping out, getting his GED, and joining the Major Leagues. 

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Why-I-mostly-support-Bryce-Harper-s-decision-to-?urn=mlb,170270

There's some controversy, of course, just as there was when Kobe Bryant skipped college. There was a time when I would have judged, but things have worked out a lot better for Kobe than they have for most college graduates, myself included. Still, there's the notion that somehow his SOUL is like a thin broth in comparison to my B.A. enriched hearty stew. I don't even follow basketball, but even glimpses of Kobe's play-off brilliance are enough to make you realize that what he's doing is as brilliant as any thesis on Sixteenth Century Continental philosophy. Anyway, the notion that if you do your homework and graduate from a good college everything will work has been tossed out the window and into a hundred new feet of recently melted polar ice.

I always did well in school, ultimately graduating from UC Berkeley with honors. Before Berkeley I attended the much more liberal Bard college -- think wild-eyed philosophers huddled around a small table debating the merits of Yoko Ono. Bard's a good school, but Berkeley definitely had a "higher performing" student body, in terms of SAT scores and GPAs. Thing is, the bulk of that student body was uninspired, interested solely in succeeding according to those standards hoisted on them by parents or whatever authority. It scared me to think that my peers were to become the doctors, nuclear scientists, and lawyers of the world, because from what I could see, most of my peers didn't really think for themselves. They just achieved -- aggressively -- in the most acceptable way possible. 

I transferred to Berkeley for financial reasons, but part of me was always proud of excelling at such a traditional school -- ultimately, of having a degree that reads "Berkeley." The more I work at my desk job, the less proud I am. The world is falling apart. As Thomas Kuhn would say, we need a new ship. Yet, we're still pushing the Horatio Alger stories. 

What parents don't feel some guilt when they read about how hard-working those Indian and Chinese students are -- how their educational systems are passing us by? Thing is, doing things by the books -- in the most literal sense -- is only going to give us more John Yoo's and Bernie Madoffs, more average thinkers willing to buy whatever these sociopaths are selling.

We use education as a shield against our personal failings. We snicker at those who talk with poor English, never mind that we can't change a tire, dance ballet, draw, or take care of our own health. There's nothing wrong with having a traditional education, but there is something wrong with using it as a crutch or a badge of distinction. Graduating from a great school does not de facto make you a great person. Nor does making a lot of money, but we knew that already.

I'm all for learning, but we need to start asking why we do things the way we do -- why we let our systems reign over our common sense. This applies not only to education, but to everything -- the law, economic policy, medical policy -- everything. Some of us do good, sure, and some of us do better than good... but these are remarkable times -- times that call for people like Buckminster Fuller, who invented a device that collects methane from cow farts (times also call for people who don't dismiss a potentially Earth-saving device because it collects methane from cow farts). We need people who see the wisdom in meditation and austerity, planting food instead of lawns, doctors who think about environmental health, DJs who throw illegal raves... the list is endless when it comes to what qualities we need in people.

And we're not producing enough of them. Though at first brush it seems harmless -- almost comical -- that a few hundred elementary school students would spend an extra thirty days in school due to a clerical error, the fact that neither the journalist reporting that fact or the school administrators tacking on the extra days can see how unjust and pointless it is to snatch away one precious summer month from children should be TERRIFYING. You should be troubled that these people can't think outside a box that small.

Complacency and submission to bureaucracy takes us to a bad place. We know this. And whatever human social problems this creates pale in comparison to the environmental issues we are (or are not) facing. But as evidenced by the Elementary School Internment Camps springing up around this country, we operate like an automatic car cruising in drive toward the edge of a cliff. Frankly, we'd all be better off if we stopped whatever we were doing and played baseball.