WorldNetDaily: Homeschool your kids and save the planet!

Doug Powers would have a hit on his hands even if his premise were no more than this: that a busload of children, homeschooled instead of riding that bus on 180 round trips a year, would save anywhere from 150-200 gallons of No. 2 Diesel fuel a year, on average--assuming that the bus gets about twenty miles per gallon and has to drive a ten-mile route to pick up all those children. And that is just one bus.

Think that's crazy? Then consider this: schools are actually taking measures, from early snow days in Georgia to four-day school weeks in Jackson County, Kentucky, to avoid buying Diesel fuel at a high price-per-gallon in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Powers' point: a lot of good the schools are doing if the kids aren't even going to school! What are they supposed to do in the meantime?

Go to school all the way through June and into July, I suppose. Those districts can't hope to save a dime unless motor-fuel prices dive as quickly as they rocketed up--and how often does that happen? The reason: 180 days is 180 days. Every day those kids miss, they'll have to make up in the summer--and motor fuel is even more expensive in summer than in winter. That's enough to make the schools hold Saturday school as other than a punishment detail. (Someone should tell my old classmates. Once, my school held Saturday school for everybody. So the boys all showed up in their pajamas. Of course the head of the upper school told them that they'd had their little joke, and would they all get into their regular clothes to go through the day--which they were prepared to do. But I digress.) Or maybe the schools will cancel Christmas, as some of the atheistic organizations would rather see them do anyway.

More to the point: if State governors and Boards of Education can't solve a simple administrative problem any better than that, and are so shortsighted, what kind of example are they setting for their pupils? Powers is right--time to homeschool, if only to end yet another source of dumbing down. Because if even the school administrators are that dumb, what kind of education are those kids going to get?