For the past few weeks, Mallard Fillmore, the conservative comic strip at the bottom of the Opinions page Monday through Saturday, has gone after our nation's schools — especially teachers, whom cartoonist Bruce Tinsley portrays as muddle-headed softies, and, by implication, the people to blame for the sad state of public education.

The silliness cited by Tinsley might match a few teachers — the kind John McCain rightly says should be faced with finding a new line of work. But there are far too many excellent educators out there, doing excellent work, to hang all the blame on the entire profession, or even the teachers' unions.

We've long felt that negligent parents have much more to do with poorly educated kids. Those who kiss off their kids' progress, of course, have their own excuses: Both of us have to work, or I'm a single parent, and the school systems don't do enough to baby-sit our little darlings after the last bell, so how can we supplement their schooling — especially after they've spent so many after-school hours fomenting rebellion or fermenting apathy before we/I get home from work ...

Anything but take responsibility, Mom, Dad ...

However, it's been a long time since the editorial "we" put a chunk of responsibility where it belongs: on the kids. Yes, kids; those budding people portrayed so often as victims of this failure and that.

So many of them are good students, reliable in attendance, busy with extracurricular activities and budding good students that even this leg of the public-education triangle can't be daubed with the same paint. But there are just enough louts and loutesses out there to make a mess of the process that they need to be called down.

These are the ones who cut classes; who mouth off to teachers and principals; who, when they do go to school, sit sullenly and refuse to take part in class; who treat school like a joke, and want everyone in on it.

In just a few years, they discover themselves as the butt of their joke: Job opportunities are, to put it mildly, limited. Colleges don't exactly welcome them with open arms. Even the armed services, or certain of them, say they aren't interested. So that leaves what — crime?

But try telling that to the thin layer of low-level teens impervious to urgings, warnings or matter-of-fact advice; those kids know it all ...

And that's what we grudgingly like about Gov. Bill Richardson's radical proposal of last spring: To be eligible for a driver's license, you've got to go to school — and knock down decent grades.

Ouch — right in the steering wheel!

Once the governor's program is in place, driver's-license eligibility for teens would be pegged to "near-proficient" scores on tests, and 90-percent attendance rates, or at least according to his original pitch. We'll be curious to see how it reaches the rule-books, and what kind of civil-liberties challenges it raises.

We're not so sure it will work: Many families need their kids' income — some so badly that Mom and Dad urge junior to drop out of school. But the kid will likely need a car to get to jobs. Does the state penalize poverty?

Rather than the governor and the school system riding roughshod over the kids, the parents ought to be the ones doing it; so we're back to their role in the state of public education.

Back East, meanwhile, school districts are paying kids to do well in school. Bribery! you may gasp — but maybe it's merely an incentive to learn, and, as an introduction to our capitalistic society, the pay-for-grades experiments themselves might prove educational.

Negative and positive pressure both have drawbacks — yet it's encouraging to see our leaders remembering, amid their scapegoating of educational failure, that schools are about kids — and kids play a role in the learning process.