More Will Be Needed

As a clean-shaven freshman entering his second semester at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus in the spring of 1970, I along with hundreds of other Rutgers students assembled to hear from our new University President, Dr. Edward J. Bloustein. 

We, the student body, had already heard stories about the former president of Bennington College for Women who'd been selected to lead the state university of New Jersey as it marked its 204th anniversary and there was quite the anticipatory buzz as we gathered around the statue of William the Silent at the Voorhees Mall Green. Legend had at it that Silent Bill, as we called the statue, would only whistle in the presence of virgins, and was thus fated to be forever quiet.

At the appointed hour, Dr. Bloustein stepped to the podium to share his perspective on the role and import of education and cut straight to the chase. "The purpose of education," he explained, "should be to learn the rules of the game better than anyone else so that you can then change the rules." And with that, he stepped back from the microphone concluding his speech as our jaws dropped from both the brevity of his remarks and the audacity of his vision.   

We were part of the four thousand or so undergraduates enrolled at Rutgers that spring but by the time we graduated in May of 1974 the University population exceeded forty-thousand. The scale and scope of changes we were to experience across and throughout every aspect of our lives, and not just at a smallish college on the banks of the sleepy Raritan River in central New Jersey, but the world could not have been imagined by anyone, to include those of us listening on that sunny spring day nearly half a century ago. 

I thought of Dr. Bloustein while reading Mayor Peter Nystrom's State of the City address of  January 6th on the importance of establishing a school construction committee "whose purpose," he offered," is to help lead our city forward as we make difficult choices."  Our City Council unanimously answered his call for action at their 22 January meeting and formalized the next steps in restructuring our public schools. 

The volunteers of the School Facilities Review Committee deserve our thanks for a lot of the heavy lifting they did that the new School Building Committee will need as they develop recommendations for the physical reconfiguration and construction of our schools before we, the voters, will make our decision. 

As someone whose father was a teacher his whole life and who, with my wife, last had children in Norwich Public Schools fifteen years ago, I hope you'll forgive me if I say we may not be going far enough if all we're concerned about are our school buildings and locations. Yes, the facilities are important, but they are only one component of a larger educational process.   

Norwich and the world of 2020 requires skills and abilities that, as a matter of course, didn't even exist a decade ago and while no one can predict what 2030 may require, we can all agree that only by remaining agile can we prepare our children to learn the rules of whatever games their world will have, and more importantly, to also change those rules to assure their happiness and success.
-bill kenny