Some lessons New York’s politicians seem incapable of learning. It appears that Mayor Bloomberg is headed for a run-in with the City Council over a bill that would turn back the clock on the successful Giuliani era approach to moving welfare recipients to work. The bill, Intro 93, which has passed the City Council, would instruct the city’s welfare agency to classify education, even homework, as “work” to the maximum extent allowable under state and federal law — setting the stage for a massive backslide from the Big Apple’s tough and effective welfare regulations. The mayor has signaled that he will veto this bill, but the Council likely has the votes to override.

This is a fight the mayor is wise not to duck. The mayor has done well by quietly continuing Giuliani era policies that held that the best preparation and training for work was — work. Under the Giuliani system, where welfare recipients are required to work 35 hours a week with little latitude, people moved from welfare to work; welfare rolls fell by more than 50% from a peak of 1.1 million people under Mayor Giuliani, and the numbers have continued to drop under Mr. Bloomberg. It would be a shame to see that progress undermined now.

Yet that is precisely what the usual suspects and advocates wish to do. Those who have in the past derided tying welfare benefits to work as “slave labor” are now doing what they can to ruin a healthy policy by returning to the patterns of work avoidance that got New York to the 1.1 million welfare case level in the first place. The bill’s introduction states that, “The Council finds that advances in educational attainment, from basic literacy to college, enhance an individual’s ability to secure employment, employment longevity and level of earnings.” Hardly anyone could disagree with such a pedestrian point. But shouldn’t, perhaps, our schools be providing these skills?

There are already a host of federal and state programs to subsidize education — from publicly funded colleges to Pell Grants and the Tuition Assistance Program. Welfare is not among them.

And if New York City is going to encourage welfare recipients to improve their lot by attending everything from college courses to vocational training, why should it be in lieu of work? There is no reason that work and education cannot be balanced. Nationwide, the strict work approach has worked. One study by the Rockefeller Institute earlier this year found that 61% of welfare recipients left the program because they found a job. Seventy-one percent of those found themselves better off as a result of leaving welfare.

The argument has been put forward that the easier cases have been solved, and that now we are dealing with a more hard-core population that will be difficult to rehabilitate. But such rhetoric is corrosive, patronizing to the welfare recipients themselves, and a return to the culture of dependency that we abandoned in the mid-1990s.