Daily Blague

Surely the most impossible story in the SundayStyles section of The New York Times the other day was Ralph Gardner Jr's report about the letter that the heads of seven of Manhattan's finest private schools recently sent to parents. The letter urged parents to veto their children's plans for an unsupervised spring break in the Bahamas or Mexico. Euh, how long has this been going on? For about ten years, it seems, well-heeled parents have been booking their children into balmy resorts, perhaps unaware of the false IDs with which the darlings have furnished themselves.

Happily,

The tradition of high schoolers congregating en masse without teacher or parent supervision at Caribbean resorts is hardly universal. “It is not a phenomenon in other parts of the country,” said Dorothy A. Hutcheson, the head of Nightingale-Bamford. She added that when she asks other educators about it, “they look at me as if I’m crazy that this is a regular occurrence in New York City.”

For Kathleen and me, this was yet another occasion to gape at the very idea of asking our parents not only to approve but also to pay for such a junket. Who knows. Here's how they do things in the place where I grew up:

At Bronxville High School in Bronxville, N.Y., traveling with your child to spring break in the Bahamas has actually become something of a tradition, with the parents staying at a nearby resort. Marty Murrer, who took the trip two years ago with his son, said that supervised spring break started several years ago after the youngsters proved inadequate at supervising themselves.

“They had had experiences where the kids went down and things got out of hand,” he said. “Excessive drinking and behavior that was way beyond what was acceptable.”

He and his wife socialized with about 20 of their own friends who traveled to the Caribbean with them. “In a community like Bronxville there’s a lot of close relations among the parents,” he said. “There’s a lot of common values. It was a great time.”

I still can't imagine it. Apparently, the ritual has a Darwinian function, weeding out the weaklings who haven't, as one young woman put it, "learned early on how to carry themselves."

The whole incredible story can be found here.