Debate: Field Trips

By Glenn and Jake

This week we focus on OYIT’s K-12 readership. Many of you probably went on field trips this year and had your own debates (in Debate Club) about whether this was good or bad.  Though Jake and Glenn both graduated high school in 1977, our perception of field trips remains as sharp as ever.  Perhaps this is because we have both been asked several times to chaperone field trips as single men in our late 40s.  Read on and make an immediate, irreversible decision about next year’s trip to see Rent.

Glenn: Going on a field trip is one of the most memorable experiences you can have at a failing public school - ranking third only behind being shot to death or getting arrested for having a bottle of aspirin.  The drudgery of the school day and year is interrupted by a trip outside the grounds.  You can travel to a museum full of overpriced art, a factory full of disappearing jobs or a football game full of murderers.  Whether the trip is educational or a reward for the class keeping quiet about standardized test fraud, it’s one of the few things our schools can do right.  Even Catholic schools, who might force their students to visit rapist priests in jail, serve their students well by helping them get out of the classroom every now and then.  You have to see the real world!


Jake: Field trips are nothing but a waste of precious time our children could be using to catch up to the red Chinese.  Instead, we are sending them to milk bottling facilities to show them where they will work in the future if they’re lucky.  In high school, I went on a field trip to a Six Flags amusement park for physics class.  Was it fun?  Yes.  Did I learn anything?  No, unless you count learning that the Shockwave roller coaster will give you a neck injury that will plague you the rest of your life.  Our nation’s children are really stupid and we should not reward them with fun trips to museums where they learn nothing but their/their boyfriend’s penises are oddly crooked.

Glenn: You would rather children learn about crooked penises on school grounds or through heavily edited episodes of Sex And the City on TBS?  The only people who should be seeing minors’ penises at school are Catholic priests who need to bless them.  I went on that Six Flags trip and I can’t remember anything from it either.  This could be because of the ten pot brownies I ate but more likely is for the same reason I can’t remember anything I learned in high school: it was too long ago and none of it was relevant to adult life.  At least I have the memory of the trip itself - getting on the bus, chomping down the brownies in the back for three hours, going on the Shockwave and puking into the faces of toddlers inexplicably allowed on that terrifying ride.  That particular trip was to learn about the physics of roller coasters but a field trip can help students with any subject.  One of my favorite junior high memories is weeping in front of Jim Morrison’s grave with my classmates after studying his life in American History.  Sure, these days students can do that by watching the Livestream of his gravesite in Paris but it’s just not the same.


Jake: You and I had very different high school experiences.  While you were munching away on pot brownies and coming into school drunk off of screwdrivers, only to vomit them up and lay in your own filth, I was reading the Qur’an and converting to Islam.  That is why I couldn’t eat hamburgers on our field trip to a slaughterhouse, and it’s why I really enjoyed our trip to the prayer rug factory.  Field trips can be exclusionary.  What of the staunch young republicans--the Alex P. Keatons--who want funding to the arts to be inexplicably cut?  Did they enjoy the trip to the Art Institute?  And what about our trip to Disney on “Gay Day”?  Only the homosexual students like you and I enjoyed that.  Everybody else couldn’t help but alternatingly vomit at the PDA and gurgle “faggot” and “homo.”  Field trips...more like yield trips.


Glenn:  I understand and have great sympathy for young conservatives, especially the anti-gay ones who are gay themselves.  However you know as well as me that people are allowed out of field trips if their religions or failed ideologies prohibit them.  This is the same carved out exception that allows Jehovah’s Witness students to refuse participating in mock presidential elections.  Their non-voting behavior makes them role models among the brain dead teens that will eventually become non-voters themselves while their country crumbles around them.  Further, as our country (public school buildings) crumbles around us, field trips are a welcome respite from your school’s metal detectors and programs to train you how to sexually “service” cyborgs.  We’ve already taken prayer, god and automatic weapons out of public schools - don’t take field trips too!  


Jake: If we were sending our children on permanent field trips to better school systems, then I would show support.  Instead, we are sending children to zoos and newspaper offices.  This is sending the message to children that they can become a journalist or a cheetah.  Children in public schools need to lower their expectations.  At best they can become a house cat and a name in the local newspaper’s blotter.  Our nation’s school systems are crumbling like my wife’s famous extra-dry chocolate chip cookies, and field trips are not the milk that will make them swallowable.  Instead of field trips, why not have programs to stimulate our children?  That is a question that will never be answered in this debate or in “the real world.”