My mom must have walked around humming that old country hit, "Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys."

I wanted to be a cowboy. I had a rocking horse. I had a cap gun. I had a cowboy hat. I was ready.

Sure, I grew up in urban Chicago, but I had a dream.

Mom and Dad, of course, tricked me into going to school practically forever, which doomed my cowboy career and directed me toward ruining my life in politics and policy and journalism.

Today, with the employment environment somewhat scary, even urban mammas are much more sanguine about cowboy dreams. "Go be something hideous like a cowboy or bank examiner or newspaper editor," the parents say. "Just don’t come home unemployed and living with us for years, eating every last thing in the refrigerator."

The message from society to the urchins of today, to the worker bees of tomorrow, is that whether you want to be a butcher, baker, candlestick maker or bond trader, you must stay in school, virtually nonstop. You need to be in school from the time that you’re, oh, maybe 3 years old, until the day you hit 18, at which time you are free to jump off the education bandwagon and go sulk.

The "pre-school" hysteria is sweeping the nation, to guarantee that the pre-kindergarten budding scholars of tomorrow aren’t home having a good time, when they could be learning theoretical physics. The old high school dropout age of 16 has been creeping up to 18 in many states, a strategy designed to ensure that teachers are always employed and the adults aren’t embarrassed by any dissatisfied customers, who as a matter of law, have to stay and master algebra.

It’s a delightful business plan that the professional educators have created: The customers are encouraged/required to sign up while just out of their diapers – and they are required to stay through age 18. The customer service desk is closed; just come to class and shut up.

"Dropouts" are treated as either criminals or victims of societal abuse, depending on the mood at the moment. The real crime, of course, is that the dropouts embarrass the adults by wandering off to a different life, free of high schools that just didn’t do much for them.

Free Market Lesson

Oddly enough, three of the nation’s most snobby, credential-crazy, "progressive" states – Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey – are among the minority allowing youngsters to drop out at 16, without risk of formal embarrassment.

The pressure is on, in these states and others, to imprison the kids until 18, as God intended, with little regard as to why the kids want to escape at a tender age.

The Massachusetts high school dropout rate is actually remarkably low right now, the lowest it has been in decades. With dropout rates down and graduation rates up, the pressure to enslave the wandering 16-year-olds is sporadic at best.

With Massachusetts practically a Garden of Eden when it comes to the dropout "crisis," it would be a fine laboratory for something different and – dare we say the word out loud – market-oriented, to snare the 16-year-olds.

There are, in fact, jobs, even occupations, that do not require diplomas, or a sophisticated understanding of what the whale in Moby Dick was actually designed to symbolize.

Offer up an informal, non-union environment in which instructors with dirty fingernails can offer, for a fee paid by the local towns or the state, a "curriculum" that suggests to the kids something more productive than selling drugs or collecting welfare.

Yes, community colleges are inclined to do that, in a bit more sophisticated way, but these dropout kids aren’t inclined to even fake academic pretension. They want something else, with no dress code, no penalty for tardiness, and no obligation to attend, unless the program is actually working for them.

Gov. Deval Patrick is mumbling about throwing anti-dropout funding to the worst school systems, but for most of these kids, another constipated, mandatory, more-of-the-same program won’t work.

Offer the dropouts a store in which they can shop for opportunity. It’s better than mindlessly making them stay in school until they’re 18.