THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 3, 1996 TAG: 9608300005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 46 lines
Today, on the first day of the school year for most students in Virginia, we are reprinting our annual school-is-open editorial.
It's a question schoolchildren have always asked: Why do we have to trade 10 weeks of summer freedom for an endless 9 1/2 months of teachers, class schedules and homework? Why do we have to spend time being forced to study things we don't care about and probably will never use again? The question deserves an answer. Here's why, kids.
To survive and prosper even in 20th-century America - let alone 21st- century America - you need certain skills. That's why you are taught reading, writing and 'rithmetic. Every day of your life will be easier if you can read well, can do basic math easily and know how to learn what you need, when you need it.
The best-paid, most interesting jobs require skills beyond the basics. If you blow your chance to get that basic education, you set yourself up for a lifetime of boring, low-paid, dead-end jobs. Thus, your schoolwork is an investment in your economic future.
Beyond that, the arts and sciences make your life richer and more interesting. Literature, music and history, for instance, provide pleasure to millions. Schoolwork, if you allow it to, can introduce you to these unsuspected pleasures.
Work itself - particularly, learning - can be fun once you overcome your resistance to the idea of buckling down. In fact, you may find that the very worst part of having to do schoolwork is not the work itself but the dread of beginning. In any case, learning how to work hard is good experience, because life rewards effort. Some people are able to slide through life without making any effort, but most can't.
Finally, the world needs you. Without civilization, a wise man said a long time ago, life would be ``solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'' In other words, without civilization, not only no home computers, cars, TVs or Walkmans; no water, grocery stores, highways or electric lights. These things didn't just ``happen,'' and they aren't maintained automatically. In fewer years than you can now believe, you and your generation will have to carry on our civilization. Can you do your part if you are uneducated?
It's hard to trade the freedom of summer for the responsibility and routine - and, yes, the work - of the school year. But your future - our future - depends on it. Work hard. by CNB