Submitted by Stephen Stoll, Apr 18, 2007 19:58

The Beacon School, like such schools as Greenwich Country Day School and various public schools from throughout the country, has offered, as part of a menu of learning venues abroad, vacation-time trips to Cuba.

Apparently, Mr. Wolf believes he has identified the central problem in American Education. It's that a handful of students have had such opportunities.

It's a disgrace that Mr. Sten and Mr. Wolf are given, respectively, lavish think tank and newspaper support to lead naive and uninformed readers with thoughtless and superficial observations of the symptoms and analyses of the causes of mediocrity and inequity that permeate the education offered to our young people in New York and elsewhere in this country.

Any reflection on their assertions will lead the honest observer to the conclusion that offering no more high school trips to Cuba will have the effect (although very marginal, at most) of lessening the exposure of American students to another culture premised on very different economic and political arrangements. High school and college classes deprived of tthese handfulls of students with first-hand experience in different cultures will lead to less informed and diverse thinking in these institutions and, eventually, among the citizenry in general.

In the long run, even the Sun might suffer from increased mediocrity and thoughtlessness among Americans.

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