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Educating my children

The most important thing any species does to ensure its survival is nurture its young. Sharing information on how to survive in the environment, to find food, shelter, and avoid predators are the basic lessons that mother animals share with their babies.  Only the mindless, like single celled organisms, and the cold blooded, like snakes, slither or swim off in the moments after birth leaving their young to fend for themselves.

The human animal sitting atop the evolutionary food chain nurtures and rears its young longer than any other creature on the earth. Even the largest mammal’s child, the young whale, is ready to join the pod long before human children are considered ready to care for themselves. 

As societies become more complex, the maturational period gets longer. Australian aborigine children are ready to join the society as adults in late childhood or their early teens. American children aren’t considered ready for adult decisions until they reach their eighteenth birthday. Even after legal adulthood, most will not be able to provide the necessities of life for themselves for years.

Complex societies like ours have come up with complex methods of preparing the young for inclusion into adult society.  The preparation period, our education system, has evolved from desks in frontier cabins with a slate to scratch out the ABC’s to multi-media centers equipped with slates capable of downloading information from the other side of the planet.

Children in complex societies have more information thrown at them in one school day than their parents coped with in a month and their grandparents in a year- or ever. We cram more information into them, but our expectations have risen accordingly. Whole industries have been built around education. From preschool to post-doc work to lifelong learning, systems of presenting the child with more facts, more choices and more opportunities continue to evolve.

Educating our young has turned into an expensive, complicated, multi tasking, exhaustive activity that we Americans gladly turn over to the experts. Even those who home school depend on resources provided by experts. Ironically, teaching one’s young to be self sufficient leaves parents feeling insufficient to the task.

The key to education in a complex society is now one of cooperation and collaboration among the family, the school and the community as a whole. No longer can those of us whose child bearing days are past sit on the porch and let the “experts” do it.  The children in our community are our children, be they white, black, brown or yellow. They may not look like us or sound like us or even think like us, but they are ours.  They are the inheritors of all we are and it is of vital importance that we treat them as our heirs.

That lesson came back to me most strongly at Sedalia Elementary School the other evening as I watched parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds – poor, middle class, upper income, sit on hard bleachers and applaud their school getting an academic award. The parents knew what so many of us out “in the world” have forgotten – that children from all backgrounds can learn when they are taught. The vast majority of  parents love their children and want them to succeed no matter what their financial, ethnic, socio-economic background.  It is built into our DNA to nurture our babies.

One of the speakers pointed out the other night that what was happening in education wasn’t happening in Frankfort or Washington, it was happening at Sedalia and the thousands of other educational institutions across the country.  The recognition of Sedalia as a “Blue Ribbon School” was a sign of the educational activity happening in one small community in far western Kentucky.

The lesson of the Blue Ribbon School program is simple. The school must be owned by everyone in the community.   We all have a stake in students being successful. We don’t need another scholarly study to tell us that when children in our society do well, so do the rest of us.

As our leaders meet in Frankfort and school budgets get cut once again, we wonder if that message is getting through to those who shout the loudest hosannas to our schools before election time and then trim their budget one teensy bit at a time after. 

In hard economic times, the path of least resistance is to slice off a bit here and a bit there from the education budget.  There is a misconception that if one takes only tiny slices of the cake and come back several times that no one will notice there’s a chunk missing. Considering the size of the educational apparatus, that is understandable, but no less reprehensible.

From past experience, I remain disheartened that the lesson will not be learned and the boom and bust cycle of funding education is in the trough period when budgets get cut and school programs suffer. 

Kicking the results down the road to the next guy’s watch is a time honored tradition. When reality sets in that our children are falling woefully behind kids in other cities, other states and other nations, the next step is for solons to declare war on the problem and dredge up that dirty six letter word – REFORM. 

Reform in education means toss everything, good, bad and indifferent, out the window and start all over again. Acronyms for new program will drip from the lips of carpet bagging educational contractors ready to sell panicked legislators the programme du jour to fix what’s wrong with our schools. 

Legislators, desiring to “fix” the schools, allocate funds on a one time basis, partially funding new programs and mandating school districts, already cash strapped, spend local money to pick up the slack. New teaching methods, new evaluations, new materials, new experts. As long as it’s new, it’s got to be good.

As the wheel of reform spins and the new becomes old, funding cuts begin to creep in and the cycle starts all over again. Lucky the child who can complete an education surfboarding between the waves of educational improvement and funding troughs.

It might be too much to ask that Kentucky break the cycle of educational boom and bust by focusing on proven techniques, like those that got Sedalia Elementary a blue ribbon.

It might be too much to ask, but I have to ask for mercy and memory on the part of our decision makers.  I ask for my children, black, brown, yellow and white, because educating them is the most important thing we do.


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