Repairing the Airplane in Mid-Flight

Wednesday
March 21, 2007
REPAIRING THE AIRPLANE IN MID-FLIGHT

Dear Jane,

Thanks again for helping keep the ball in play. Know that your efforts are much appreciated. As I've already stated plainly, I'm racing to get as much as possible down on paper and collected together and organized, before the geniuses who pretend to run the Security Patrol Dept. for the KCMSD decide to put me back out in a patrol car, answering alarm calls, preventing excessive violence in our 50 or so schools, and writing insipid incident reports. Wish me luck. Thanks for listening and for sharing your input.

Since the seemingly sudden rise of Neo-Feudalism and the consequent dawning of The Age of Re-Endarkenment on election day 1980, public education has been in danger of losing its potency as America's foremost bulwark against the slow but sure suicide of all we hold dear. How is the airplane of American public education (Pre- thru 12) to be repaired in mid-flight? I have a few ideas, as, I'm guessing, do you. One challenge in sharing the kinds of ideas folks like us carry around in our heads in anything resembling a public arena is that they must needs, by their very nature, prove threatening, heretical, mythoklastic. Yet share them we must, even if only in code.

The one member of the KCMSD school board (all elected volunteers, of course) with whom I'm lucky enough to have fairly frequent conversations is a 70-something retired high school science teacher with white hair over his shoulders and a white beard down to his sternum. He reads all the same books and periodicals that you and Art and Marie and I do -- and evidently votes in pretty much similar patterns. Several months ago, I ran across an ad in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS for a newly released book on consensus building in both the public and private sectors. (Can't recall the title or author, offhand.) Anyway, I googled a review of it and gave it to my wizened old board member pal -- who immediately ordered it from Amazon.com. I mention this here in reference to the urgent need in America's body politic today for (as I insist on calling it until I can come up with a better term) consensus, in some form or other, wherewith we might, indeed,
set about repairing the airplane in mid-flight. Some common ground, some shared vision, some agreed-upon principles or philosophy or hope. Or, barring any of that, SOME SHARED DREAD of the consequences of continuing down the path we presently seem to be on.

What I hear you saying about your background is that you're an archaeologist and not, strictly speaking, a cultural anthropologist, but I still feel that you, Jane, are uniquely qualified to enlighten me on the subject of: WHAT ARE THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENTS OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES EDUCATING, INCULTURATING, TEACHING, PREPARING . . . . THEIR YOUNG??? Children must be prepared for that unknowable world into which they'll be compelled to enter and attempt to survive, compete and perhaps prosper. It seems to me that only a tiny fraction of today's children are receiving any such preparation.

And the very worst part of it may be that the drop-outs of today are the parents of tomorrow. And while it may well be that even democratic America will always need an enslaved underclass, it strikes me as a worthwhile goal to see to it that "all God's children" gots sufficient preparation so as to follow the drinking gourd of wisdom north to whatever's there. HAPPY SPRINGTIME!!!

Galen