The Washington Post ran a story recently about school field trips. It hardly surprises me that they’ve become incredibly lame:

The three dozen first-graders were a rowdy and wiggly bunch, almost as jumpy as some of the animals brought out for them to pet.

The two classes from Arnold Elementary School in Arnold, Md., were on a field trip, 10 minutes from school, visiting a local Petco that was already as familiar to the students as McDonald’s.

That’s an interesting way to put it, because one of the better field trips I went on as a child was to a McDonald’s. I’m not sure, now, whether this was a field trip to a McDonald’s, or if it was a field trip somewhere else, but with a stop at McDonald’s on the way back. The general routine was, we’d all come equipped with an elaborately-frozen and -wrapped can of soda, which would be left in the school bus all day. While we were at the zoo, or the Arch, or the Twinkie factory (yes), or at the brewery (yes, really, in high school), the bus would head off to a nearby McDonald’s and pick up a hundred burgers and several bushels of fries, which we’d eat in a park or something before heading back to the school.

Anyway, one time we actually went to a McDonald’s in person, and we were given the grand tour. Did you know those places have basements? Some of them do, anyway. Or at least one.

Is it legitimate to take kids to a McDonald’s in the interest of education? The Indymedia crowd would almost certainly denounce the trip as capitalist indoctrination, training kids for their future as McDonald’s slaves and Tools of the Machine.

I, on the other hand, approve. McDonald’s is part of the world we live in, and a McDonald’s restaurant, taken as a whole, is a pretty interesting machine. I don’t think it would make for a good field trip all by itself — there’s not enough there to engage the kids for very long — but it’s definitely a learning experience.

Going to Petco, though, I’m not sure about. We once went to a grocery store, but the attraction there was in the back-room areas, the storeroom with twenty-foot-high stacks of toilet paper, the butcher shop with its hanging carcasses, the enormous walk-in refrigerator where eggs, cheese, milk, and such were stocked directly onto the shelves that fronted on the ordinary part of the supermarket.

That is, the attraction and redeeming value of the McDonald’s and grocery store field trips were that they exposed me to something that was ordinarily hidden. Yes, these were places of commerce and places we’d been hundreds of times already; but we hadn’t been there in the same way, as observers from the other side of the looking-glass, as it were.

Visiting an enormous pet store so you can play with puppies and kittens just doesn’t seem to be in the same league. The problem isn’t that commercial interests are sponsoring field trips, or even that they’re sponsoring field trips doubling as marketing exercises. Hell, the trip to the Twinkie factory was clearly a marketing gimmick — they had a special room in the basement of the factory where a former Harlem globetrotter they had on full-time field-trip duty showed us a movie about Wonder Bread (same company) while we scarfed down Ding Dongs. But at the same time, there were things to be learned there: how bread is baked on a massive scale (a conveyor belt that continuously runs pans of good through an oven that can take thirty loaves across, that’s how); how they get the goo inside the Twinkies and Ding Dongs (another machine, surprisingly enough); and how the squiggly icing is put on top of Hostess cupcakes (yet another machine, with a cam-driven icing nozzle).

The problem is that the schools are swallowing these marketing exercises without making much of an attempt to get anything educational out of them. Part of this is probably laziness, but more of it is an ever-narrowing definition of what is ‘educational’. I’m of the opinion that nearly anything novel that you expose a child to is educational, but the establishment ever0increasingly sees education solely as something that happens in a classroom. And, if that’s true, then just about all field trips are a waste of time, so you might as well take the path of least resistance and truck the kids down to Petco.