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Honest Work Nothing to Smirk At

A poster in my daughter’s high school shows a teen-age boy, wearing a red apron, carrying an elderly lady’s groceries to her car. The caption reads: “You can have a career in marketing. Drop out of school.”

At first I’m puzzled. Of course I get the message; If you drop out of school, you’ll get hopelessly stuck in a low-paying, low-status job. However, I’m not expecting to see honest labor ridiculed. At least not in the form of a school poster.

I can see the value of staying in school for as long as possible. I can even imagine other inspira­tions besides a good-paying job. In school, for example, there’s the chance one might enlarge one’s mind, or overcome one’s inherited prejudices, or grasp the debates on important local and world is­sues. If a student is fortunate in assignment of teachers, one might even learn to think for oneself in school, instead of mindlessly adopting political and social views popular to the times.