Sir: I read in this afternoon’s Dispatch that our superintendent of schools considers it her job to see that children are happy. Happy! Can you imagine a more shocking perversion of an educator’s mission? The only purpose of schools is to prepare children for adult life. Will they be prepared for the working world if they are coddled in an artificial world of fuzzy Norman Rockwell good cheer? No; they must be inured to grey monotony, day after day, year after year, until the hope that naturally infests the childish psyche is rooted out and utterly obliterated. They must wake before dawn to appear at their desks early for no good reason; they must eat the same appalling food at every lunch; they must devote all their energy to rote tasks in which success will be of no benefit at all to them, but failure will be ruthlessly punished. They must be made to understand that “success” is a privilege given to other people, not to them, by a capricious providence. They must lead lives of unrelieved misery. Then, and only then, will our country become great again. Happy! Either the woman completely misunderstands the aim of education, or she is nothing less than a saboteur bent on destroying America’s leading position in the world of commerce. I would say that she ought to be punished appropriately if it were in my power to imagine anything more miserable than being a school superintendent.