Now that three-quarters of the major presidential tickets have said something nice about private school vouchers, the kids who started school this week could be the last public school graduates in American history. Schools will soon go private, becoming as organized and lovable as that other great private institution, the HMO. So let us compare the old public schools with the dawning era of private education, my belief being that they both kind of reek.

Public schools did pretty well when I attended them in California in the 1970s. Sure, 55 percent of my graduating class thought the sun revolved around the earth. But since the universe has no fixed point, that theory has technically never been disproven.

And we did all right in the end. It was my approximate generation that created the Internet revolution, a whole new branch of the economy based on clever juxtapositions of symbols and countless pictures of Britney Spears. We supplied a vast reservoir of knowledge and imagination, and we got it partly from school, and partly (judging by some of those Silicon Valley types) from Grateful Dead concerts.

But then property taxes got cut, and now California’s school system, once the best in the country, ranks somewhere next to Liberia. The same sort of thing having happened across America, the people who’ve always criticized public schools are now actually onto something.

Buildings are falling apart. Teachers are buying their own supplies. The first cramming that students did this year was when 100 of them tried to fit into one classroom. And if you don’t think your public schools are facing deadly competition, you’re living in a happy dream world of magical, dancing rabbits. Private school students are already as plentiful as minnows, and in the battle for teachers, the mighty, milk-fed suburban campuses are towering like a laughing colossus over the scrawny, asthmatic urban schools.

So now vouchers will save us, and here’s how: We take even more money out of the public schools, and they get even worse.

What will life be like in a world of private schools? Great for the stock market, actually. The vast majority of private schools right now are religious, especially the affordable ones. So thousands of new secular schools will have to open up for those of us who prefer to raise our children in a godless universe of despair. Huge corporations will probably own most of those schools. Things will be, in a word, feudal. And who doesn’t want to live in the Middle Ages? And paying for school construction by bartering pigs?

But what will we have lost when public schools disappear? Zaniness, for one thing. In Haledon, for example, the public school day this year starts at 8:08 a.m. Not 8:09 or 8:07, which of course would be completely insane. To make class time the same length as in other schools nearby, it’s got to be 8:08 exactly, or else the kids will come out dumb.

But more importantly, as more of the better students go to the better schools, children will be stratified at an earlier age. Our days in public school are the last time most of us meet people from radically different walks of life — when the girl who becomes an intellectual properties attorney has a breathless romance with a guy who will end his days living in a van behind his parents’ house, when the guy who later starts a trade magazine gets punched in the face by a guy who later sells carpets.

So let us look back upon our public school system as we would upon a friend — a friend who, from time to time, has stabbed us with a pencil and stolen our lunch money, but who has also shown us the world, and whose passing still makes me shed a tear.

At least I hope that’s a tear. Please tell me that’s a tear, because if that’s not a tear, somebody spit on me in the lunchroom again.