Attending school, especially high school, is the most arduous thing anyone will ever do – until they enter the real world. On that day, what seemed so difficult and demanding for four years to a teen with a short attention span pales by comparison with the requirements of a real job, real bills to pay, real responsibilities and very real penalties for failure. It’s a lesson that should be learned by everyone before the realities of life limit their choices, but, given the nature of things, probably won’t be.

This notion arises just now because of a crackdown at Santa Ynez Valley Union High School. The administration there is playing hardball with the students, punishing them for, of all things, being late.

 

What’s the big deal with being late? In the schools, it all has to do with the way education is paid for in California, a byproduct of Prop 13. That was an initiative item that won ballot approval from California’s taxpayers back in 1978. The taxpayers thought they would be able to limit their tax liability by, in effect, legislating a cap on property tax increases. Viewed in isolation, Prop 13 achieved its goal – sorta.

As with so many things in life, however, tinkering with one piece of the puzzle can produce unintended consequences to another part. In the case of Prop 13, the consequence was to kick the legs out from under the school system. To offset the loss of property tax revenue growth, which was the funding source for the schools, the state legislature took over school funding and instituted a per capita funding scheme that allotted cash only for students who actually attended school.

 

Now, that is the proximate cause of the crackdown in the high school, where protecting funding requires that the kids actually be where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. If an audit finds an empty desk, money is lost to the school district.

The students themselves don’t actually see things that way. They don’t seem to have an answer to the question, “Why would the school administration do this?” But they’re absolutely sure that the crackdown is unnecessary and probably harmful to student interests. Students referred to the office for mid-day detention are missing instruction time, and therefore are the real victims – so goes the logic. For them, apparently, it’s a test of competing prerogatives: the school administration’s prerogative to make rules with no meaning and the students’ prerogative to flaunt rules with no meaning.

Somewhere the purpose of a public education has been lost track of.

 

The public school system was not really devised as a corral in which pre-adults can be restrained until they are ready for life, thus freeing their parents from the necessity of hanging on to them all day. It was intended as a place where people raised in a rural, agrarian society could learn to survive in an industrial setting. That’s why free, public education spread across the nation in the wake of the industrial revolution.

What was so important that industrialists of all stripes banded together to push public education bills through state legislatures was the general worthlessness of most of the laborers they hired. The uneducated youth of America in the early industrial era had a tendency to drift in to work whenever they pleased, leave when they tired of their day’s toil, not listen to direction, not understand simple written instructions, and be sober when it pleased them. Sound like anybody we know?

 

Face it: public schools weren’t created to produce scholars, nor to win international contests with adversaries who delighted in besting our mathematicians and physicists. They were invented to teach people to tell time and be punctual, to follow directions and to stay sober. And, to this day, whatever else they may add to a person’s knowledge base, those key concepts are among the most important things they teach.

These things aren’t just vestiges of pre-industrial America, they have actual application in everyday life. It’s all well and good to complain that the school’s parking lot is so poorly designed that it contributes to student tardiness by delaying otherwise good kids on their way to class. But try telling something like that to an airline employee when you’re 30 seconds too late to board the plane.

 

So, looking at the bug-tussle over tardiness at the high school, though it might be easy to imagine, as the students do, more mysterious, even sinister motives behind the crackdown, what it really boils down to is this: have the students learned how to tell time and be punctual, how to follow directions and how to stay sober? Since there seems to be a problem, the answer must be ‘no.’

 

That’ll be 2 cents, please.