[Sidney Lanier]

I've dealt with huge high schools and small ones. I attended a high school of 5,000 students and got enough of a quality education to qualify for a free college education which was outstanding AND which served 8,000 full-time students (plus thousands of part-timers). At one time I worked for a centralized cooperative educational system that brought small numbers of students from small districts together to form larger classes and settings in order to provide more comprehensive services.

IMHO, it's not the size of the school that's as much of an issue as social factors. I absolutely agree with the quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan ("If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves"), who besides being the senator from New York also devoted a considerable portion of his life to education. And that quote was a quarter century ago; does anything believe that things have improved since then?

I might get 'yelled at' for saying this, and I know I'm generalizing, but I believe that the major issue in no matter what size schoo--large or small--is that students come unprepared to learn, parental support of their kids AND of their kids' schools is absent, and even worse, in a society that has grown increasingly hostile and belligerent in many ways, too many parents are not responsible when it comes to discipline (and I don't mean punishment when I say discipline...). When I was in school, if I did something that resulted in my being taken to task, you can bet that when I got home I'd be taken to task again.

Gone are the days.... I have a close friend who says that the only good thing about the 'good old days' is that they're gone. I don't agree; there was a lot of good in those good old days!