column on Page Four. This week it was headlined "School year needs to be longer''. The editorials for today and Monday are derived from that column.

President Clinton has said: "The difference between success and failure in life for our children is whether they're learning on the streets or in the school where they belong. The street is not an acceptable alternative to the classroom.'' That is true, of course, yet, like the United States, Bermuda organises its school year on an archaic pattern which was not designed for life today.

Amid all the talk of schooling and new schools in Bermuda we have heard no talk of keeping today's students in school where they belong. It's fashionable to blame parents for their children "running wild''. The cry is, "Where are the parents?'' Very often there is only one parent in a family and that one is at work and when there are two, today's living requires both to work. However, as a society, we fail to recognise today's conditions and today's lifestyles and go on operating schools on a schedule which is contrary to the way we live.

Let's face it, today's society virtually requires that both parents work. That means no one is at home in the afternoon or during long summer holidays or at half-term, at Christmas or "Spring break''. But people's children are out of school even though the adults are at work.

It is far too easy to reply, as we so often do, that the schools are not baby sitters. The truth is that the schools must be designed for today so they can fulfill a role which suits life today and not life in the Nineteenth Century.

We go on with a school year which was designed for an English agricultural society in another century. The children are let out early in the afternoon so that they can go home to mother and help with the farm animals and the chores.

They have long summers off in order to get in the harvest. Does that make any sense at all in Bermuda in 1996? The kids you see "hanging out'' are not bad kids. They are not born delinquents. They are "out of school'' and they are on the streets, where they clearly do not belong and where they are likely to get in trouble, simply because school is out at times when it should be in.

For much of history the school year was arranged around what families needed.

Then we fell into a trap. We stopped organising our schools to suit the family. We put both parents to work and our children on the streets. Then we wondered why the children were "running wild''.

What the family needs today is for the children to be supervised in school while the parents are outside the home because they have to work. Right now that does not happen because we build any number of hugely expensive buildings and keep the doors shut, using them less than a third of the day and about half the year.

Parents are driven mad trying to juggle demanding employers with child care.

Too often the children suffer.