Mayor Bloomberg has won a splendid victory and now has ultimate power over the school system of the city he governs. He is also now out of excuses. He must use his hard-won power to begin immediately preparing our 1.1 million public school students for life in the real world. He has said that if he can't get that done, his mayoralty will be a stark failure. He's right.

Our public school system has one task: to provide the intellectual, social and technical tools that allow children to live productive adult lives. The school system is not there to provide therapy. It is not there to train basketball players. It is not there to provide jobs to otherwise unemployable adults. Its only goal is education.

In that spirit, here are some ideas that go beyond teacher salaries and credentials, and that could help make our system the envy of the planet:

1. Scrap the junior high schools: That is, go back to the system of grammar schools and high schools, grades 1 to 8 followed by 9 to 12. Most kids get into trouble in junior high, when they start working on the creation of masks to impress — or ward off — older youths. The tough guy mask. The sex bomb mask. Both are compounded by hormone overload. But working on a personal image isn't the same as getting educated. Kids who have been together since first grade can't get away with creating an act, without being laughed out of the schoolyard.

2. Build an enhanced system of vocational schools: The aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks showed once more the immense value of our blue-collar craftsmen. Thankfully, not every young person wants to be a lawyer or go to the Harvard Business School. Bloomberg could create a brand-new vocational school system in alliance with businesspeople, union leaders and master craftspeople that could provide the workers of the New York future. A well-trained plumber is infinitely more valuable to society than a mediocre lawyer.

3. Create dress codes: All kids in the first eight years should wear school uniforms. The general purpose of such a rule would be to place emphasis on the mind, rather than such irrelevant externals as clothing. All superficial differences in class, race and ethnicity would be reduced by uniforms. The child of an illegal immigrant would dress in the same way as the child of a doctor.

To be sure, City Hall would have to find money for those who can't afford two sets of uniforms, but in the era of $130 sneakers, there must be some money available. In high schools, a dress code could be established that sets clear limits on adolescent slobbery. Neckties for boys, slacks for girls. No tattooed bare bellies, please.

4. Ensure absolute computer literacy: Make certain that every graduate of New York schools knows how to use computers. Bloomberg, who has made billions through the computer culture, could design this curriculum himself, with a yellow pad and a pencil. He might also create a program with private industry to get personal computers to those children who can't afford them, but who have shown through their grades that they will make real use of them. Any parent who sold such a donated computer would be indicted for child abuse.

5. Teach television: Every teacher — and we have thousands of excellent ones in our system — knows that the television is the single greatest enemy of education. Its content is invincibly stupid. Worse, it creates passivity, since the active process of reading is displaced bythe passivity of merely watching.

Television should be taught the way literature is taught, and for the same purpose: to create an intelligent, critical audience. Starting in the fifth grade, and moving into greater complexity through ninth grade, teachers could demonstrate through scripts and tapes how most producers hold them in contempt. How most characters are cardboard cutouts. How music is used to manipulate emotions. How laugh tracks are added because the producers think the audience is too stupid to know when to laugh. How commercials are used to persuade viewers to buy junk. Smarter viewers will create better television. And emphasize how reading simply can't be replaced by manufactured images.

6. Teach New York history: This should be a basic template for every New York student, explaining what the city is, how it was created and why it remains the greatest city in America. Poor kids should learn that they are not the first New Yorkers who were poor. White students should understand that African-Americans have been here since the time of the Dutch.

Historian Mike Wallace of the Gotham Center has created a superb warts-and-all curriculum for teaching this city's extraordinary history. It should be implemented immediately. And made vivid by field trips, the use of Ric Burns' multipart PBS documentary and examination of great New York movies from "King Kong" to the works of Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. Every student of our history should be supplied with passes to the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society.

One additional benefit: Every student could help instruct his or her parents about the city in which they live, particularly those who are immigrants. This is a thrilling story, full of myth, horror, skulduggery and triumph. Every New Yorker should know it, from an early age.

When I was 16, I spent a year in the apprentice program in Shop 17 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The system was simple: I worked for four weeks with master sheet-metal workers, then took academic courses in the fifth week. My apprentice wage was $42 a week. In the company of men, I learned the most valuable lesson of all: how to work. A similar citywide program, where 16-year-olds could earn money while being educated, could reassert the pride that every blue-collar worker feels in his or her hard-won craft — the indomitable New York pride they showed us so valiantly after Sept. 11.