As the Twig Is Bent

The countdown is accelerating, and by that I mean the back-to-school countdown. 

All the shopping, planning, route-mapping, car-pooling, prospective after-school extracurricular activities integration, scheduling, and meal preparations take on a life of their own, and our children's return to the classroom is no longer an 'if,' but a 'when.'

As someone whose school report card grades often looked like I was crafting a ransom note out of the letters the teachers gave me, and whose own children are long grown and gone, I've watched from a distance as the U. S. Department of Education, at the direction of President All the Best Words, dismantles itself. 

Someone has forgotten, I believe, that the purpose of an education is to create a public equipped with the intellectual tools for critical thinking and analysis. And you can put that in your red ballcap and smoke it. 

I think the demolition of the federal department (leaving Linda McMahon to be the dummy for bridge at Cabinet meetings, not exactly a stretch, I suspect) brilliantly, if unintentionally, complements 21st Century Amerika, where we no longer care if children actually learn anything as long as they try 'really hard' and are well behaved. 

Attention, shoppers! Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. And the last time I checked, no one was being awarded a medal for being a BETA or insisting their ignorance (and arrogance) should trump someone else's knowledge. I checked with all the scouting programs, and (surprised!) there's still no merit badge for 'I do my own research,'  but it's a nice dream, so keep at it.  

For generations, we've been shipping children to facilities that resemble warehouses more than anything else in yellow boxes with wheels for as much of the day as we think we can get away with, and then, in more recent years, get pissed at their teachers when the kids don't do well. That most of us can't identify our children's teachers because we've never met them at a parent-teacher conference (or even know where the kids go to school) is beside the point. 

The world in which you and I grew up, the post-Eisenhower era, which ended the Industrial Age (and for those who are post-Jimmy Carter, I hate your youth), has been replaced by the Technology Age. 

We in the Land of the Round Doorknobs use a lot of tech-and have a voracious appetite for more of it, but we haven't let very much of it change how we educate our children unless you think of 'badly' as an educational philosophy.           

Education is/should be the greatest financial investment we make as a nation/society. And more than anything, we need to reverse engineer unbiased measurements and standards to finally make sure No Child (Is) Left Behin,

Let's fill in the hole in the holistic approach for what comes next, and not just in the classroom. I'd like to see it in building design, traffic patterns, urban landscapes, our arts and crafts, and let's enforce it as we do now with other professions, ranging from plumbers to doctors. When was the last time you let your oncologist get away with 'dude, sorry I missed that shadow on your lungs' or had your general contractor explain as your basement fills  with water that "it's my bad." 

Education is built for distance and not speed, designed to last and to prepare us for a lifetime. The Brave New World schoolhouse doesn't have a lot of empty seats for vacant-headed people, and if we don't work to improve our game real soon, we will have difficulty reading the writing on the wall that says our time for coming and going has come and gone. We complain a lot about the cost of education in America wait until we start paying for ignorance.

-bill kenny