Before the Hootenanny begins, I see by my collander — er, calendar — that it’s time to educate you on lectures. But now that I take a closer look, it’s time to lecture you on education.

Education is important! So important. Not as important for us as it is to the continuation of teachers’ unions, but still pretty important.

Where would unions be without education? Where would kids be? I can tell you that kids would be running amok, and they’d be pretty stupid, much like today. But they’d probably be worse off without education. You can’t prove this hypothesis either way, since there’s no control group, but neither can Covid-mask-imposing governors, who are a control group if ever I saw one.

But what constitutes education? Well, if a kid tries to climb a tree with an anvil tied to his back, and falls, that’s an education. If he does it six times, it’s not. In Melbourne, Australia, they’ve imposed their sixth lockdown because the first five lockdowns worked so well. This is all because they had 8 new Covid cases out of the city’s population of 5 million. They did not publicize how many residents tested positive for tarantula or gowana bites in the same time period. It’s reported that 170,000 people die each year in Australia from all causes. They want to reduce that to under 8 by locking the population in their homes.

Education means “learning”; and, boy howdy, do we learn throughout life. So what role do teachers perform? The non-violent ones, I mean. Well, even the gentlest ones are there to drill things into our heads. Think about that phrase for a minute.

As a parent, why would you accept stuff being drilled into your kid’s head?

I’m sure we’ve all seen enough bashing of public schools to last a lifetime — just open a newspaper and turn to the police blotter — so it’s probably time to bash private and parochial schools for variety’s sake.

Private schools are easy, like the girls who attend them. Stuck up (ditto). Parochial schools are even more difficult than them to pound, because — correct me if I’m wrong — “parochial” connotes “religious.” Only kids who go to private and parochial schools understand what “connotes” means. And none of them understands what parochial means.

I should mention that I myself went to school. But I won’t.

If you are unable to get your mind off those private-school girls, remember: their uniform blouses were clean, starched, white, sometimes a size too small, and sometimes effectively see-through if you used your imagination, which is not conducive to learning. Imagination and learning often clash. A crucial difference between private and parochial schools is that there are no nuns in private schools to whap the bejusus out of you for noticing these kinds of things. And in public schools, forget it. You’d be in a rumble like in “Grease” before you knew who or what hit you.

I hope this underscores the importance of education. It certainly underscores the fact that the title of this should have been “Schools,” not “Education.”

And the difference between the two must never be forgotten.