10 May—Before adjourning last week, the Connecticut General Assembly was considerate enough to pass a bill that will allow Waterbury public school pupils to “suffer” for 176 days rather than the state-mandated 180 because of the rather catastrophic water main break in December in addition to the usual snow days. “Suffer” is the actual word used by a state representative or senator—whose name I didn’t catch—in a radio interview.

The solicitous pol’s exact words were, “Why make the students suffer for something that was beyond their control.” So, you may ask, is going to school really suffering? Suffice to say, I enjoyed school—even Hebrew school, if only to a certain extent. Shame on me?

Evidently, according to surveys and alleged experts, many kids really do suffer in school; and Waterbury, with a notably “challenged” (as the euphemism has it) school population is no exception. Pupils are said to suffer not only from classic schoolyard and hallway teasing and bullying, but also for academic, social, and emotional reasons.

To oversimplify and generalize, the poor suffering kids can’t take the alleged chronic stress and anxiety of testing and the concurrent fear of failure. And of course that leads to depression. Even in Connecticut, it would appear, where so-called social promotion is pretty much the norm even for pupils who, for whatever reasons, literally can’t make the grade. Waterbury’s is one of the school systems in Connecticut (along with Hartford, Middletown, and New Haven, among others) where teachers are required to award a minimum grade of 50 even if pupils fail or don’t attend class. That’s not just giving, that’s awarding.

Yet in many surveys, by many quasi-objective criteria, Connecticut’s public schools are rated among the very best in the country, coming in second only to Massachusetts. It would appear that the state’s more affluent towns and regions (over)compensate for the deficiencies in the less affluent cities. And, like it or not, affluence is a dominant and determinant factor in pupil performance.

Kids’ home life and parents’ interest and involvement—assuming there are interested and involved parents or parents at all at home—have a lot to do with kids’ education. Discipline should start at home, of course. But often as not parents leave disciplining their kids to school personnel, whom they regard simply as baby sitters. (That also goes for private schools. And even colleges.)

And school discipline just ain’t what it used to be. These days, leniency fills in for discipline. Among the non-disciplinary discipline is what’s known as the restorative justice approach, relying on ineffective but socially preferable stratagems like counseling and peer mediation. In other words, let the kids do whatever they want.

Back to kids suffering in school, then, everybody knows it’s really the teachers who make the pupils suffer when—if—they try to maintain even a modicum of discipline and try to impart a little knowledge rather than letting the brats get away with all the crap their parents tolerate . . .