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Your comments on public education make more sense anything I have read about school shootings or school quality combined. Historically, it has not been normal to have young people crammed into a building all day, sitting in seats, waiting in lines to be mass produced.

Home school was a wonderful, exciting, daring and adventurous time for my three children. They studied what they loved, and that led into all areas. They worked outside the home, worked with chores and raising animals, worked with other people and were active all day long, learning all day long. Their minds were opened and interested and alive. One is an architect in Colorado, one is traveling around the world in two years' time and the third is a student at University of Vienna in Austria. The learning continues with joy. I wish all youngsters could have that opportunity.

-- Marsha Linder, Solon, Iowa

I am a retired machinist some 70 years old. I applaud you for your opinion on trade schools. I barely got out of public high school. I told the teachers that if they would graduate me I wouldn't come back.

I have never been out of a job. You cannot name anything that we use today that has not been produced in some way by machine tools. I am a very strong supporter of trade schools. It's one thing our government could do best. I served my apprenticeship at Quonset Point N.A.S. during the 1950s, and the training I received there eventually led me to start my own business. It was successful, and I am still active in the trade.

My grandmother always said, "Learn a trade. Then you can do anything you want, but you will have the trade to fall back on." Good advice .

-- Stephen Chellis

A quick note from a girl on a construction site: Thanks for today's article. I refer specifically to the section where you mentioned young men and women entering professions other than office-bound cage jobs.

I have just applied to law schools, and I had signed up with a legal placement agency to get a legal assistant position. In the meantime, through the agency, I have been working at a construction site at a major airport. I have been assisting the engineers in the trailer, and I have to say it has been wonderful.

My undergrad degree was in telecommunications, and I am a Realtor. My true loves are the humanities, and writing is the passion. However, I love being on the job site with the men -- hardworking, great, smart people, and the few kick-ass women who run at least half the show. It has been a great experience.

-- Anonymous

Thank you so much for such a refreshingly honest look at culture today. I am a product of a fairly nice private Ivy League university (B.A. and M.A.), but I am appalled at the state of education today. To see that the modern high schools of today are nothing more than prisons, one need only look at one and see the fences, the police cars, hall monitors, etc.

When I went to high school (I graduated in 1975), my friends and I had plenty of guns to go around -- heck, we played hooky to go pheasant hunting! (And we were a VERY suburban school, not a redneck to be found.) But there was never a thought to actually committing mayhem at school, even against the bullies, such as there were: It just wasn't pukka.

It seems like the more the heavy hand of authority is brought to bear on young men, the more they fight to escape it. Yes, there need to be father figures to at least threaten to smack some sense into them (moms make the rules, dads enforce them), but the use of the State as Father Figure is nuts.

The state of higher education is, if anything, even more scary. My eldest daughter is all set to go off to the University of California at Santa Cruz, which sets me all atwitter. Talk about the home of PC! Of course, since I have raised her to question everything, as well as to be a good shot (I don't worry about her becoming a statistic: God made Mankind, Sam Colt made them equal), my worries are more that she will have challenges with the politically correct crowd. However, she must find out the truth for herself, and all I can do is warn her of the pitfalls.

-- Gordon Frye, Stockton, Calif.

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