To the editor:

Is there a connection between the plans to build a Wal-Mart next to Free State High School (Saturday, J-W) and the proposal to cut certain upper level high school English courses (Sunday, J-W)? Perhaps the bean counters figured what’s the point of reading about Dante’s nine circles of hell when you can wander up and down the brightly lit aisles of America’s favorite store.

It’s dangerous, almost seditious, in our consumerist culture to teach a student to think about the essential questions of life. Poetry, literature and philosophy have a way of clogging the wheels of commerce by questioning the need for getting and spending. The saddest aspect of this process is that even after it’s all paved over and students spend the better part of the school day manipulating a mouse, they will never realize the paradise lost.

Ray Finch,

Lawrence