A vow to forsake a certain subject is a hard one for a writer to keep. For the good reason that the subject itself refuses to go away, but rather continues to provoke.

Recent reading, including Richard Carpenter's Jan. 30 column, brings one back to that delicate subject, "the schools." Which are now so much better, we're told, than in the Good Old Days.

The Good Old Days, bemusedly one notes, are now only a few decades back, rather than in the more usual 1890s. This writer, then, even as Carpenter, could speak of them from personal experience, though the 1890s offer a more meaningful and interesting contrast.

The Renaissance was the rediscovery and resurrection of the Good Old Days of antiquity, the Greco-Roman world so clearly superior in learning to the Medieval.

Not until the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, a couple of centuries later, did men take up the bad habit, now rampant, of sneering at the past. But Renaissance man had it right: If we know more than our forerunners, it's thanks to them. They are what we know. We stand on their shoulders. They were the youth of the world, not us. It's we who are the doddering old grandpaws.

Carpenter puts the superiority of our Good New Days in their superficialities, in technical gadgets. But even these are the fruits, not of us, but of his Bad Old Days.

The men who built the scaffolding of modern science were Victorians, that much-scorned race, men taught in the likes of one-room schoolhouses and deprived of such "educational" boons as "tennis, golf, volleyball," etc. Einstein barely squeaked through a polytechnic, or trade school, late-blooming as conclusive proof that all "education" really is self-education.

The word is criminally misused. To "educate" is "to bring out."

That is, bring out what's in. Schoolmen like to fancy they're doing this, but the most they can do is afford the climate and the tools by which the young may be inspired to bring themselves out. What schools properly do is "instruct," which is more nearly "putting in" than "bringing out."

Back in those more honest Good Old Days, schools came under a "Department of Public Instruction."

An archeologist once introduced himself here: "I'm an instructor at the University of Missouri." He understood that archeology, like any science, can't be "brought out" but must be "put in."

Confusion about "education" began, back in the early 20th century, with "physical education," which of course is really "physical training." Then came "driver education" and countless other "educations," culminating in the most outrageous of all, "sex education."

A recent book contends that schools should teach only three subjects: English, Latin, and math; the languages being the keys to the arts and math to the sciences. Armed with these tools, the student can go on and pick up everything else, can "educate" himself.

The broader definition of "education," therefore, is literacy: the mastery of reading, writing, and ciphering.

The writer happened to pick up a catalog from Moundville's Cooper College, dating from the Bad Old Days (1895). Despite that private school's claim to offer a "practical" curriculum, it came uncannily close to just "English, Latin, and math."

Wonderful to tell, Carpenter laments that the Good Old Days taught no foreign languages. Doesn't he know German was dropped in 1917, by unanimous vote of the Nevada Board of "Education?" That Greek and Latin were ubiquitous? That a famous 15-year-old couldn't even get into college till he could already "extempore read, construe, and parse Tully, Virgil, or such like common Classical authors; write true Latin in prose, be skilled in making Latin verse, or at least in the rules of Prosodia; and read, construe, and parse ordinary Greek, as in the New Testament, Isocrates or such like, and decline the paradigms of Greek nouns and verbs?"

An oft-repeated saying goes something like this: The only true schooling would be Plato seated on one end of a log and a pupil on the other.

Unfortunately, Platos are as few as pupils are legion in these Good New Days when democratic dogma decrees that classrooms must be cluttered with the unteachable.

One can't read deeply in history without coming to recognize that formal "education" has always been a clueless muddle, at least since the vacating of Plato's log. The Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge were, early on, more famous for student riots than erudition. The great British public schools taught boys how to be gentlemen and good sports, but not much else.

The problem is, large-scale public schooling is by nature and necessity a giant, unwieldy bureaucracy. In America, it's the largest industry of all. Public school teachers, technically, are civil servants, for a profession is a trade at which one can set up independently.

In Britain you can be licensed to call your living room "Joe's School," and wait for pupils; and they'll come. It's eternally intriguing and telling that America's religious and other private schools turn out better-performing students than the public schools, and at a fraction of the cost. They too may be mini-bureaucracies, but they aren't so under the thumb of that worst of bureaucracies, the government. And lately, homeschoolers are outperforming all.

Undoubtedly local schoolfolk's hackles will rise at this column, as at earlier ones. But nothing said here is aimed at local schools in particular.

Our teachers and even administrators deserve one's deepest commiserations. In these Good New Days they're Gullivers among the Lilliputians, the best of them tied down and hamstrung by myriad Mickey Mouse mandates from government, above all that Federal obscenity the Department of "Education," churning out its steady tsunami of politically-correct social-tinkering decrees.

In my day (Richard's sarcastic Good Old Days), the superintendent and the high school principal both taught classes, as well as "administrated."

These days, I'm sure, "administrating" is a more-than-fulltime job.

This is an area in which Parkinson's Law applies with a vengeance: "Work expands to fill the time available." Make that "makework."

The editor riposted a previous column in this series by assuring readers that, contrary to its alarmism, the Nevada schools had been formally and officially adjudged excellent in quality of "basic education."

One can't help mischievously ending by suggesting that the authority for such ratings is but another arm of the very bureaucracy that's being rated.