You Don't Seem to Notice

The best thing about being a pessimist is that you can only be surprised, and never disappointed. For reasons that predate my arrival in The Rose City, many of us living here wear a coat of disappointment as a sort of shield, lest we get too excited or happy about a possibility working out for the best. 

Some of us seem to enjoy living in a world with little more than varying shades of gray or choosing to not make choices, unaware that by choosing NOT to decide, we still have made a choice and that choice has consequences we often fail to see, or to see in time.

Because we've spent so many years struggling to manage economic development the way a horse runs, looking no more than one footfall in advance of where we are, we've allowed ourselves to be managed by events rather than mastering them. 

As another school year begins for those with children in Norwich Public Schools, we are seeing in classrooms across our city proof that our myopic perspective is limiting our children's horizons and our own possibilities for improvement.

Collateral damage in our continued inability to enhance revenue streams and increase the Grand List has been the death by degrees of many of the school enrichment initiatives that some of our older children had when they were students. Quite frankly, the reductions the Board of Education needed to make, because the money simply wasn't there, went beyond any pretense of 'fat' and cut to the bone.

The size of the classes has changed, the staff available in the schools is smaller, and the limitless possibilities that a quality education is supposed to provide every child at every desk in every school have been sharply reduced. We are a city sending children in the primary grades into schools that lack the tools and talent to enable them to fully succeed, and it's not going to get better in the immediate future.

So that I'm clear, this isn't going to be a tough year for our children--this is another year in what will be a tough life. As Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel write about in 21st Century Skills "(o)ur current Knowledge Age is quickly giving way to an Innovation Age, where the ability to solve problems in new ways...and invent entirely new industries will all be highly prized." 

But if our children are to be in the wave, creating new ideas and offering fresh solutions to local and global problems, we'll need to prepare them better than we're doing and perhaps better than we're able, at least right now.

As is so often the case, there are no quick fixes, no drive-by solutions or instant corrections--to provide our children with the greatest of all gifts, a brighter future. 

This November election cycle, if you think that because you don't have school-age children, you have no stake in this effort, then this would be the moment to rethink that assumption. The time to question everything will be here in a moment; brace for impact.

-bill kenny