So consumed are many here in The Rose of New England with who'll be our next full-time-though-the-charter-calls-for-a-part-time-Mayor and members of the City Council we may be losing sight of the "other" and perhaps (in my opinion) more important election, for seats on our Board of Education.
Not me, brother, I have my eye firmly fixed on the prize and here's why.
It was the spring semester of my freshman year at Rutgers College when the new University President, Dr. Edward J. "Call Me 'Fast Eddie'" Bloustein addressed as much of the university population as could fit in the quadrangle behind Voorhees Hall.
He was a man with more advanced degrees by himself than perhaps all of us assembled before him and he cut to the chase speaking over the hubbub as we milled about the statue of Willie the Silent struggling to hear whatever pearls of wisdom he would deign to share.
We, or at least I, were not to be disappointed as I've remembered what he offered to this day. "The purpose of Education," Doctor Bloustein told us, "is to learn the rules of the game better than anyone else, so that you can then change the rules to your advantage."
With all due respect to the number of school buildings (and what the right number of buildings might be), pupils per classroom ratios, middle schools, magnet schools, the importance of not cutting teachers' jobs and all the other valid (and some a little less than) perspectives offered by those seeking to be our next Board of Education, I'm looking for a view so large it scares us because we need it.
My wife and I had two children, now adults, whose good fortune was attendance in Norwich Public Schools and who are, by my definition, successful adults in part because of where they attended school, and when.
Their classrooms, at the now-gone Buckingham School and the pre-renovated Kelly Middle School, included chorus, instrumental music, language, art, and many other programs I only dimly remember because we eliminated them in the last nearly two decades or so to reduce overall budget increases and slow a rise in tax rates.
But we get what we pay for and it's long past time to change how we view tax dollars that support public education, recognizing them for the generational investments they are instead of the expenses we currently see them as and, just as importantly, concede education is a multi-path process, not just a brick building with yellow buses parked out front.
There's not a parent among us who doesn't have a 'back in my day' school-time story complete with walking uphill both ways in the snow and who wonders why that's not still true. We forget that we're not who we were, but rather who we are, on the way to who we are becoming.
The only constant in the universe is change and resistance and failure to embrace change is how we will kill our city, our society and ourselves.
No one steps into the same river twice, because both the river and we have changed.
If standing still ruled the world, how much of what you and I take for granted, the machinery within the scenery, from electricity through automobiles to computers and beyond would exist? No one I know would want to live there.
Here's a bigger question we all need to work on answering: from where we are right now, how do we educate our children (and ourselves) to get to tomorrow and what does that tomorrow look like?
Questions to think about, or to choose not to think about when we vote Tuesday for Board of Education. Here's another one: if you think the price of education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.
-bill kenny
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