#herndon

Many teachers get very upset and angry when I speak of schools being in the jail business. They say, as I would once have said myself, that they personally are not in the jail business. They don't feel like jailers, and they are not running a jail. Perhaps not. But the facts remains that if their students did not go to school, and within that school to their class and even their desk or seat - if they did not do that they would go to jail. This, as Herndon and Dennison point out, is what compulsory school attendance laws mean. They do not mean that society says to young people, we would like you to please go to school. Society says, if you don't go to school, we are going to put you in jail - a real jail with bars in it. For most children, school is the better choice. Most, not all - The New York Times once told about some boys in South Carolina who, offered by a judge a choice of going back to school or going to jail, unhesitatingly chose jail. But these are still exceptions, still a minority, though a rapidly growing one.