COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Education system deserves trust

Being an amateur wordsmith, I admire Steve Smith’s professional skills, but because he made some egregious slurs against education in general, and my school district in particular, I am impelled to criticize the content of his Oct. 21 column (“Schools need innovators, not gatekeepers”).

So that you can better evaluate our differing opinions, I’ll do two things: explain the technique he uses to persuade you when he doesn’t have enough facts, and give you lots of information on the issues he raised.

Smith’s style of persuasive writing is to give you just enough facts to justify a reasonable-sounding opinion, then, having gained your trust, unload an unsubstantiated bomb of an opinion — slipping in words carefully chosen to make the medicine go down — and then quickly move on to another thought before you have time to critique the bomb you have just swallowed.

Smith chooses as the center-pole of his circus tent the well-known fact that, “In California, for example, the single largest budget item is education.” Around this he drapes freighted words and ideas like the following: This education “establishment has become a very large and lucrative economy that relies almost exclusively on grabbing as many of your tax dollars as possible.”

I’ll frame the same set of facts the way I think the voters of California have intended: We, the people, believe the most important thing our state can do is provide free education to all our children, so we empower our legislators to tax us in order to pay for it, knowing it will be the largest state expense.

But that’s just my opinion. Let me give you some background facts so you can decide which of our opinions is closer to reality.

It is a long-held value of the United States that free public education for all children is necessary for the good of the country. This belief goes all the way back to the 1800s.

Initially, there were bitter arguments over the concept. It was such a huge change from elite-oriented tradition that the debates lasted for decades. Tellingly, some of the early arguments still persist, such as: the rich shouldn’t have to pay taxes for other peoples’ kids on top of private school tuition for their own children; the religious shouldn’t have to pay to support schools they don’t believe in; the childless shouldn’t have to pay even once for schools; and the libertarians (they were called “liberals” in the 19th century), of course, shouldn’t have to pay for anything unless they want to.

Even some arguments overcome by time still resonate today, such as the arguments by people of German descent who didn’t want their culture and language to die out: Pennsylvania contained many of them, and they strongly resisted the concept of free public schools that would draw children and support away from their own German-language schools.

Unreasoning fury and resistance to change is another ancient resonance. That this was unleashed back then is shown by the fact that about 10% of the petitioners against free schools in Pennsylvania couldn’t even write their own names; they had to use their marks. Yet, they were against free public education for all! I can only marvel at what their agendas could have been.

But, starting with Pennsylvania in 1834, comfortable majorities in every state eventually agreed that it was best for the long-term interests of American society that there be compulsory education for all children, free of charge. (That this profound endorsement of public education began when our republic was still a toddler — less than 60 years after declaring independence from England — speaks volumes about how important our forefathers thought public education was to the future of their young country.)

These first free schools started modestly — three or four months a year for three or four years — just so that kids could at least “read, write, and ‘figger.’ ” As the national economy grew and science and technology advanced, state legislatures responded every 40 years or so by raising the bar. For the kids, this generally meant they had to be in school longer and to master ever more advanced subjects. For the legislators, this generally meant they had to raise more funds to pay for more teachers, supplies and buildings. Difficult as it might be for them to raise taxes, legislators and governors levied them in the spirit of fulfilling their state’s commitment to the future.

This loose synchronization, with a 40-year beat, between society and education held until the 1950s. Then the synchronization stopped. Though the economy kept on changing, the pipeline for investments in education got constipated.

Just when states should have been spending even more money than usual on education to bring the next generations up to date with the fast-accelerating national — and now globalized — economy, several elements aligned to take money away from public education.

It appears that at least three forces are working against synchronizing education with society. One is that reactionary forces are attempting to flog schools throughout the nation into becoming the little red schoolhouse of the pre-1950s. Another is that those who have long opposed free public education have switched strategy: Instead of arguing directly against it as they did in the 1800s, they are now attempting to “starve the beast” by undercutting its popular support. By denigrating it at every turn, their hope is to raise, by contrast, the appeal of other ideas such as charters and vouchers. A third that obtains especially in this school district is the frustration of parents who are effectively denied the use of their neighborhood walk-to schools by classrooms overwhelmed by under-prepared students (typically non-English speakers). They resent having to travel to distant school sites in order to find suitable, challenging classmates for their children. For them, the old, 1834 country school type of system doesn’t work well.

The bottom line is this: India, China, and any number of developing countries are leveraging the Internet and their low wages to overtake us while we quarrel among ourselves.

My final comment is about trust, or more accurately, lack of trust in our tax-supported civic institutions. The national education “establishment” that Smith bemoans and likens to “the military-industrial complex that former president Dwight Eisenhower warned about” has been put there by the voters for a good reason: to do the day-in, day-out, grunt work of education that responsible society wants done.

It’s the same reason we have police “establishments” and fire “establishments.” While it’s always desirable — in fact, mandatory — in a democracy to critique creations of that democracy, such as schools and police, it is counter-productive to mistrust them on a routine basis. (It’s like so mistrusting your jaw because you have occasionally bitten your tongue that you constantly monitor every motion it makes. Sure, you can do it, but is it really the best use of your life?)

If Ronald Reagan, with his statesman hat on, was willing to trust foreigners (famously, the Soviets with a nuclear treaty, as long as he could verify compliance) shouldn’t we extend at least the same level of trust, if not more, to our own citizens? Of course, we’ll verify compliance of our “establishment” employees, but let’s first trust them to do the right thing.

So I urge us to be skeptical of those who would have us always mistrusting our civic institutions. (And I include in this bunch the same Ronald Reagan, who also famously asserted, only now with his politician’s hat on, “Government is the problem,” and “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”) The people for too long have tolerated this knee-jerk mistrust, and it is tearing American society apart.

Mistrust for good reason, yes, but mistrust as an article of faith? No, that is both lazy and bad citizenship.