Education, Please

We sat in rows of small oak desks supported by art nouveau wrought iron frames that were permanently screwed into the floor. The desks could not be moved. Moving was not encouraged. The desks could not be reconfigured for story hour or small group learning. We did not have small group learning. Everyone faced the blackboard which was not green, looked up at the American flag with its 48 stars and said The Pledge every morning. If I remember correctly, there was a public address announcement that indicated that it was time for the recitation and the ritual placing of the right hand on the heart. The PA system had an Orwellian quality, as if Big Brother or God were giving instructions from above. When I was in fourth grade during the McCarthy period, the words “under God” were added to the The Pledge and I dutifully said them until we, the renegades, the proto-resistance, refused to repeat what we didn’t believe and were summarily exiled to the school library in high school, a badge of honor in my opinion. Later, I discovered a sacred presence and my own relationship to the holy. It was everywhere. Certainly not anything that I was “under.”

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

Public education was a culture shared by almost everyone, except a handful of privileged private school kids in pleated skirts from Bloomingdales and the children in dark navy uniforms who lined up outside Holy Trinity. For the rest of us, PS9 was our world. It was not a perfect world. In a perfect world, children from different cultures who spoke different languages would learn together. In a perfect world, children of varying abilities would play together and get to know each other. Instead, we were victims of tracking. In my classrooms, where middle class white kids learned the principal exports of Argentina, all of us were white. Almost all of us were Jewish and came from families where education was venerated. Elsewhere in the building, Puerto Rican children struggled with English. Children with divergent brain chemistry were ignored. Public education was a shared culture but not everyone was permitted a portion.

Now even that best case scenario of the fifties is under siege. The people who run our government are suspicious of public education because it claims to lift all boats, because it is secular, because it at least gives lip service to critical thinking and space for differences of opinion. They want to defund the laboratory where democracy - under proper care and conditions - just might flourish. What does education even mean now when facts and reason are the enemy? On FaceBook recently, I encountered the meme that purported to be something written by Pope Francis during his last hospital stay. Perhaps you saw it. The piece describes a hospital as a paradise of equity and compassion where:

In intensive care, you see a Jew taking care of a racist...

A police officer and a prisoner in the same room receiving the same care...

A wealthy patient waiting for a liver transplant, ready to receive the organ from a poor donor…

and so on. I was a great admirer of the late Pope and immediately shared the post to other people who in turn shared it. Then a friend who knows more about the Christian world than I do informed me that the piece was generated by AI. It was a fake. I felt hurt and embarrassed by my gullibility. But then I thought about it and decided that it wasn’t so important who, if anyone, wrote those words. It was important that the idea of equality, of respect for our differences seen in the light of a recognition of our commonality, should exist and be disseminated. And this made me ruminate on public education and its loss.

The fact that our school systems are flawed doesn't mean that we should abandon them. Autocratic regimes have arisen all over the world for complex reasons. Climate change, mass migrations, and concentrations of wealth to name a few. But as Robert Reich wrote recently “Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.” A population starved of learning is a passive, distracted and easily manipulated population. Education and democracy are inseparable, like the two strands of the double helix. You can’t have one without the other.

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