Did they need to provide permission slips?

I think this would’ve been an interesting field trip, although I can’t imagine taking such a class:

Nicki Amouri hands her camera to a friend, throws her arm over another and smiles wide as she leans in for a shot with the monument her class came to visit.

It’s a typical field trip memento — except that Amouri is visiting a brothel. The monument is a fluffy, queen-sized bed in a Western-themed party room reserved for VIPs and big spenders.

Amouri was one of a dozen Randolph College students who took a tour last week of the Chicken Ranch, a legal bordello in the desert 60 miles outside Las Vegas. The class trip, which included seminars from the working girls, capped a course on American consumption and “the ideas that consume us.”

That’s fascinating enough, I guess. The closest I ever approached such an experience, I heard second-hand about a trip to a strip club while in Slovenia for an international business consulting class during graduate school. But college class is “wacky” doesn’t intrigue me. The entire curriculum shouldn’t be that, but throwing in a diverse experience is probably useful. Instead, this is the part that frustrates me:

“We gave them all the option to either opt out or express reservations privately. No one did,” said [American Culture Program director Julio] Rodriguez, adding that he received no objections from parents or administrators.

Is there a single segment in America that hasn’t been infantilized in deference to some supposedly higher authority? Politicians, maybe?

College “kids” – adults, almost every one – are thought to still be under the direction of their parents. Financial aid is regimented around this idea, with impossible obstacles to navigate for any student who dares to assert that she is independent and supporting herself without assistance from her parents. And don’t forget the inevitable article focusing on college students and credit card debt. They’re smart, but they shouldn’t be allowed to risk making mistakes. They’ll wake up one day, lacking experience, miraculously capable of making the “right” decision.

That last sentence is snark, of course. When society releases people to their own decisions, and when they (not) inevitably make mistakes, say with a bad mortgage, Congress will be there to rescue them from their mistakes and protect them from future mistakes.