Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York, has determined that attending the victory parade for the Yankees is more important than attending school. (Story here.) When Schools Chancellor Harold Levy opposed this encouragement of cutting, Giuliani excoriated Levy because Levy got 10 tickets, which is hardly the same thing as the Chief Executive of New York City encouraging kids to miss school.
Although I have come to expect this of Giuliani, who is nothing if not consistent, the biggest issue for me is that he doesn’t even see why people are upset. It’s this politicization of education that causes so many people to choose private schools for their kids, and it’s another example, it seems to me, of the anti-intellectualism that seems to permeate politics recently (i.e., W).
I would have put this in the Pit as a rant, but (a) I wanted to know what y’all think, and (b) it doesn’t contain any Anglo-Saxon vulgarities.
If they made it an official day off to be made up at a later date - like a snow date - I’m cool with that. After all, when I flipped burgers and now that I have a “real” job, I can take time off from my job for whatever reasons I wish. I may lose pay (the former position), or I may have to make up the work later (my current job), but this doesn’t stop me from taking that time. If I lived in NYC, i would have killed some vadation time to go to the parade.
However, I understand that Rudy simply said “evryone cut class!” which I do not dig.
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Satan, I agree with you to the extent that Giuliani should not have told everyone just to cut. And it certainly would have been better to make it an official “snow day” (and it actually snowed, too) and to have made up the class at a later time.
However, it still seems to me that you (the royal you, not you personally ;)) trivialize education in general if you say, in effect, that the Yankee parade is more important than school but, say, a space launch is not. If you want kids to attend a Yankee victory parade, hold the parade on a weekend or on a day when public schools are closed anyway. Sports is already so glorified, and education, despite the lip service being paid to it in the election cycle, so underappreciated, that even your suggestion is not a compromise that would make me happy. But it would still be better than Giuliani’s behavior, so if and when you run for Mayor, you’ve got my vote!
