Another Life Lesson

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 first full week. 

Even 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 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.

Perhaps different where you live, but here in Norwich, now and when city budget discussions heat up next 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, a handheld device, 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. 

I typed this 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 help 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 that 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