Musing of One Watching a Man Who, Using a Casting Rod to Fish From a River Bank, Accidentally Snagged a Sunken Log, Thought He Had Hooked a Huge Fish,

and Reeled Himself Into the River

We saw on the news the other day that the Los Angeles school district has just completed a $578,000,000 "Taj Mahal" high school complete with extravagances. This seems to us to be characteristic of the tendency of public bodies to persuade taxpayers to provide funds to allow them to build they want instead of the minimum needed.
Young people should not go to school for fun. It's a tax supported institution, not a free one and young people should go there to learn the skills and develop the self-discipline required to become a productive self-supporting member of society, and for no other reason. This requires only that there be adequate classrooms fully equipped for this purpose. They should be designed to encourage the student to accomplish the goals and move on.
This is this kind of philosophy that has gotten the United States into its current fiscal mess.