Courageous teachers at a Brooklyn high school - fed up with unprepared and even illiterate students - made an impassioned plea to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein yesterday to end social promotion.

Last week here in New York, a group of teachers got together and wrote the Schools Chancellor urging him to end the practice of social promotion. Apparently sometime after I left the hallowed halls of education, someone decided a child’s delicate sensibilities might be damaged if they were forced to repeat a grade because of lack of effort or just plain not making the cut.

Wow!

When I was in school, if you misbehaved you got into trouble and if you didn’t do the work you got left back. I don’t know who came up with the idea the system wasn’t working - it seemed to produce a good crop of adults in my parents generation and mine but, these are PC times so, go figure.

I just can’t see how passing someone along when they do a bad job is a good precedent to set - somehow, it seems to me that’s part of what is wrong with our society today.