226. Public Schools

It’s hard to believe I’ve waited this long to write about this passion of mine, but it is so obvious that I overlooked it. I love American public schools. I could get specific to Idaho since I spent 35 years teaching in Idaho public schools, but I really love all public schools and their mission—our mission as Americans through our public schools. And I do believe it is our mission. The idea is that we have an independent, critical thinking electorate so that our democracy can thrive. I’m not going to say they are perfect because they are not. I don’t believe there are perfect people and people run our public institutions, including schools. But the aim of public schools is to strive for our “more perfect union.” There are many detractors both obvious and insidious to our schools and those detractors come because we lose sight of the main goal: independent thinkers who know how to get solid, truthful information and put it to use for our democracy, a democracy that is dependent upon debate and compromise rather than strong arming through ideology or autocracy.

All the conflicts that occur in our society are carried out and debated not only in our state legislatures and the halls of congress, but in our public schools. Many people would like religion to be a part of their students’ education but because teaching a particular religion in a school could be conceived (or actually be) indoctrination, religious education has been removed from our schools. I believe a general education of religion would be helpful so that our populace knows what others believe and how their lives are structured, but that has been divorced from our public education, probably because it was done wrong and served, in pockets of the country, to indoctrinate more that educate. I really admire how religious education is done in the UK and I think we could learn a thing or two from our mother country in that regard.

I spent 35 years teaching in public schools, all of those except one, in Idaho, and I still coach cross country at the school I have worked at for the last 29 years. Much of the insight I have about our public-school system is not only from being a student and teacher in that system for over 50 years, but also from teaching abroad in the UK for a year. I love that our schools are more thorough in educating the whole person, though perhaps somewhat weaker than our European counterparts in the religious education aspect. I love that our schools promote critical thinking and independent thinking. I love that our schools encourage creativity through sports and the arts and it drives me crazy that in the past few years we have begun to starve schools of the funding to continue that work at the expense of competitive testing in areas that students naturally feel weak because they ARE weaker due to the nature of their age.

I have been in schools throughout our country and throughout Europe. In general, American students seem happy and they do have strong opinions about their education, feeling they have some voice in it. I think that is important and we need to continue to encourage them. Right now, in Idaho, the tax structure for public schools throughout the state is inequitable for rural and poor school districts and does not meet our constitutional mandate. Our district, along with many other rural districts in the state, is running a levy to go beyond the state funding so that we can continue to offer the full curriculum we do now. I’m going to stand outside a few yards away and ask for signatures for a ballot initiative that would restore corporate income taxes to their original 8% from the current reduced 7.4% to help ensure more equitable funding for public schools in Idaho because I love public schools.