When All of This Became All of That

It's hard to believe the golden summer for which we so yearned while slogging through all that snow and ice this winter, has, for all intents and purposes, come and gone. Those plans for vacations and days off we hoped to enjoy have had their 'best used by' dates disappear before our eyes and here we are at that place on the calendar where we start the next chapter and turn the page.

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. You long ago knew it was gone as you readied them for this week. School was to have started today for many youngsters in Norwich, but due to Tropical Storm Irene, it's now been delayed until next Tuesday. Regardless of when it starts, summer is over.

If your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

In the days ahead, many of us will hit the stores armed with lists of school supplies and struggle to juggle after-school activities, our jobs, and fractious households that don't run themselves. Soon too many will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Now, and when city budget discussions heat up in April, are really the only times we devote any thought to education which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, actually, to all of us. This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money but, and it's a cliche, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together-and, trust me on this one-different elementary schools, too. Our schools were so different from the ones our children attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony, by the knowledge age. This is typed on a workstation keyboard-our children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make our desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world our children and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young helps no one at all.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that means all of us, must recognize the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again.
-bill kenny