Valley Commentary : Are We Too Poor to Deny Kids a Richer Education? : It’s a sad situation when adults who had activities in school like field trips and shop classes aren’t willing to pay taxes so today’s students can also have them.

I’ve been thinking about young people lately, and I’ve come up with some new ideas for in-school activities. I think they might stop trouble on campus, keep kids away from gangs and divert them from video games. They might even get teen-agers interested in school.

Some of these ideas are pretty radical, I know, but I think the times we are living in justify doing some unusual things to get the students focused on education and ready for the world they will be graduating into.

Here are my ideas for additions to the curriculum:

* ART. We could hire art teachers and make it part of the regular curriculum. Art is part of an educated person’s life. We try to teach literature, don’t we? And who knows? Maybe having a place to paint would divert some graffiti-sprayers to artwork that’s more imaginative and less destructive.

* MUSIC. Kids love it more than anything, of course, but I suspect that for many of them, music means rock and it started with Elvis. Why not teach them a little about music through the ages? We could teach the really interested ones to play musical instruments. I think we could actually have orchestras in elementary schools. By the time the kids got to high school, they could be playing serious music at a high level. For the ones who don’t care for fancy music, we could have high school bands as big as college bands marching at halftime.

* FIELD TRIPS. Part of education could be learning about the city. What if once or twice every year, each class got on a bus and went somewhere: a museum, a bakery, a dairy, a recycling plant, a landfill, a newspaper, the forest, the desert, the mountains, the ocean? It would cost a few bucks for a driver and school bus in the middle of the day, but I think it would be worth it.

* LANGUAGE. There are many languages spoken in Los Angeles schools, but not many are taught. At a lot of high schools, Spanish and French are about it. Wouldn’t it be exciting if a student could learn Russian, Italian or even Latin in high school? Why, it would be just like college!

* DRIVER EDUCATION. Have you seen the way young people drive? They all take safety courses, only now it happens in traffic school, after they’ve gotten tickets.

I know some people will say it would be a waste of time that kids could use to learn more about polynomial equations, but I’ll bet they’d eat up a driving course, and it would be socially useful as well.

Let’s see, we could have classroom sessions, showing 15-year-olds videos of traffic accidents and giving them safety lectures, and then put them behind the wheel alongside instructors. OK, if this is too non-traditional, we could do some of it after school.

* COOKING and SHOP. I guess this is a frill too, but what would be wrong with teaching kids how to cook from scratch, sew, do simple carpentry and replace the oil in their cars? I know they can order a No. 3 with a Coke from Mickey D’s, buy a T-shirt from the Gap and get a tuneup at Midas, but some practical life skills will come in handy. We could hire specialist teachers who could not only tell them how to do things but show them and let them practice, in kitchens and workshops right in the schools.

Now, I’ve asked around, and most of these things are already going on here and there. But it’s hit or miss, depending on whether there’s an appropriate teacher on the faculty. I’m talking about regular programs, so that everybody . . .

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What’s that? You say that all these things were once commonplace? That they have been disappearing since about, oh, 1978? That the Los Angeles schools, for example, don’t routinely replace teachers of the more exotic foreign languages when they quit or retire? That music education has almost disappeared from elementary schools?

And you say it’s because there’s no money? For schools? You mean adults who had all those advantages when they were in elementary and junior high and high school now aren’t willing to pay enough in taxes so kids can have them today?

No money for schools? In California? I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.