Letters to the Editor
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Yoyo1952...
If your wife's students choose to not pay three dollars for a field trip but shell out fifteen to wrestle, or whatever you said, I mean, surely that's more the school's fault than society's, or the social system's, as you call it. It's not as if they're poor and don't have the money, the problem seems to be that they are unexcited about going on school field trips because the school has failed to instill any kind of enthusiasm for learning. When I was a kid and went to private school we all happily paid for our field trips (most of which cost much more than three bucks) and looked forward to them with great anticipation, and no, it's not because we all had great parents. If the federal government wants to incentivize literacy, I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, are you seriously telling me that kids shouldn't be able to identify the main character of a short story? Of course they should. Is main character identification, in and of itself, a terribly important skill? No. But I imagine the reason they test it is that it's a basic sort of way of measuring young kids' reading comprehension. Obviously if you can't read a story and at least say who's the main character, you're not going to be able to understand much else.