The Chalkboard is kind of perplexed by all the hoopla in New York City the last two days surrounding the field trip that kids from Manhattan's Beacon High School took to Cuba. The NY Sun lashes out at it here in an editorial.

A couple of really quick thoughts:

-- Mayor Bloomberg notes that we are a law-abiding society and that if we don't like the rules we should get them changed. OK. But isn't one of the best ways to get rules changed to get more and more people to simply ignore them, until they are rendered useless? Ignoring stupid rules is even more patriotic than following stupid rules, no? Isn't that what America was supposed to be about? (Note: This wasn't a charter school, but as an aside, isn't that what charter schools - at their core - are all about?) Isn't thoroughly understanding WHY rules exist more important than whether or not you follow them?

-- Was anyone forced to attend the field trip? Isn't that an important point?

-- My elementary school-age kids have taken bulls--t field trips to such bastions of higher learning as Applebees- Times Square, the Outback Steakhouse, and Krispy Kreme. And now we're suddenly outraged about allowing high school kids a chance to take an educational field trip to see something REAL, including communism?? How screwed up is that? One bias I bring here is that I studied briefly in the old Soviet Union as a college student. It was one of the most educational experiences in my young life. (The only victim was my liver, which had never theretofore been surrounded by so much cheap vodka.)

-- I really worry that as guys like Sol Stern use this episode to attack liberalism, they are simultaneously adding to the anti-intellectual wave that has helped numb our education system senseless from coast to coast. I know Sol has been outspoken in the past against that wave, but it almost feels like he's doing a cannonball into the pool and causing it this time.