Feudalism in Congress?

I was sent the following John Tierney op-ed from the New York Times (registration/payment required):

"Your Page, M'Lord - John Tierney - NYT

Suppose Nike’s founder, Phil Knight, asked taxpayers to subsidize a program for 16-year-olds to leave their homes to become “squires” running errands at Nike headquarters.
Or suppose, before his death, Sam Walton had asked Congress to build a dormitory in Arkansas to house teenage “serfs” spending a semester away from their schools to work on a Wal-Mart loading dock.
These executives would become national jokes. They’d be denounced for trying to revive 19th-century child-labor practices and 12th-century feudalism. There would be no public money appropriated for Knight’s Squires or Sam’s Serfs.
Yet Congress sees nothing strange about dragging teenagers from their families and schools to become pages, one step below a squire in the feudal food chain.
They’re not being forced to wear Prince Valiant haircuts, but they have to do scut work that’s probably even less useful than what they could learn at Nike or Wal-Mart.
Congressional pages spend much of their time hand-delivering documents, a job that’s done electronically in most 21st-century institutions. When educators talk about preparing youth for jobs in the Information Age, they’re not talking about training messengers.
The justification for the page program is that it gives teenagers an insider’s glimpse of how Congress works. But why disillusion them at such a tender age?
If they stayed in school, they could maintain their innocence by reading the old step-by-step textbook version of how a bill becomes law. By going to Capitol Hill, they see how the process has changed:
1. A bill is introduced to build highways.
2. A congressman receives a donation from a constituent who wants to open a go-kart track.
3. The congressman persuades his committee chairman to slip in a $350 million “earmark” for an “alternative sustainable transportation research facility” in his district.
4. The chairman quietly adds similar earmarks for all members of the committee.
5. The bill is passed unanimously.
6. The president complains about the “wasteful spending” but signs it into law anyway.
7. The congressman attends a fund-raiser at the new go-kart track.
What lesson has the page learned? That Congress is the closest thing in modern America to a medieval court: an enclave governed by arcane ancient rules of seniority, a gathering of nobles who spend their days accepting praise and dispensing favors to supplicants.
They’re so secure in their jobs, and so used to being surrounded by groveling minions, that they assume the privileges of feudal lords when dealing with pages and other lieges. Which is why, on occasion, they try to exercise the droit du seigneur.
Unlike previous scandals, in which members were censured for having sex with pages, the current one so far doesn’t involve physical contact. But it features lewd messages from Representative Mark Foley to a teenager asking about his sex life and requesting a picture.
When you are chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, as Foley was, this does not qualify as research for your job.
Even if you could somehow quell Congressional libidos, even if this scandal taught members of Congress not to hit on teenagers, the page program still wouldn’t be worth paying for.
It should be eliminated, as Representative Ray LaHood has proposed, for the sake of both Congress and the pages. They need to be spared not just from lustful congressmen but from the chief lesson taught by the program: that success is all about making the right connections.
To get into the program, you (or your parents or their well-connected friends) have to find a member of Congress to sponsor you.
Once in, the supreme goal is to ingratiate yourself with someone powerful enough to help you move up the Washington hierarchy. As Rachel Swarns reported in The Times, Foley was a favorite of the pages because he offered them the gift of access.
“If a congressman was talking to you, it was the best thing in the world,” said one former page, Patrick McDonald.
Spend enough time as a page, and you can easily believe it’s not what you know, it’s who you know — and whom you flatter.
Granted, toadying can be a useful skill in most lines of work. But it’s not a lesson teenagers need to study for a whole semester, especially when it’s being taught in text messages from a lord on Capitol Hill. John Tierney/NYT"

I think that Tierney's piece trivializes the page program. The page program is a chance for young people to learn about the nuts and bolts of the political and legislative process. No one ever said that politics was pretty and heaven knows there have been abuses of the system, but there are many who have nothing by positive experiences within the page program.

"For both Minnesota pages, their stint with Congress was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to don ties, gray slacks and navy blazers and get a sneak peak at the backstage of history, sometimes before it was made.
"It was probably the best experience of my life," said Schilmoeller, now a law student at Tulane in New Orleans."

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. In an age where American school children are exposed less and less to civics and how our government works, we need something to our children about how the system works...warts and all.