The times have changed but the public schools have only gotten a new hairdo. When I was a kid in school, they were populated almost exclusively by crazy old bags who had left planet Earth a long tome before. From the “science” teacher who made us open doors with kleenex so “the germs wouldn’t jump off onto our hands,” to the one that made us wallpaper doll houses so we would know the “proper” colors for each of the compass headings, to the one that told us if we were forced to breathe pure oxygen at the hospital our lungs would catch fire, to the ones that refused to let us read anything printed after 1880, to the principal that forced me to take Latin, to the math teacher who terrorized us with surprise tests, just the threat of which made us have diarrhea before class, to the must-attend Christmas parties, to the gym teachers that used gym to torture those of us who were not athletic (always ending in cold-water showers until your legs nearly gave out and you sucked your genitals up into your neck), to ... well, you get the picture. We survived public school, that’s all. If you didn’t have smart, caring parents, you were pretty much screwed. I see no meaningful change since then, just movement to different types of child abuse and torture. And in all these years, teachers’ unions are to blame.