I don’t think we ever quite get over that “back to school” feeling. It is, believe it or not, almost eighty years to the day since I was first taken (or dragged) to school, and in spite of my stubborn resistance, I had to go many more times after that. Later, I was a college teacher for many years, so the end of August always had the same slightly vertiginous feeling, like being poised on the tip of a high diving board above a pool of unknown depth, and I often wondered why I was doing this instead of something easy like tightrope walking or lion taming.
Education is difficult, whether you are on the giving or the receiving end. There is this once-only window of opportunity when young minds can absorb information with incredible efficiency. This is the time to learn things like languages, music and mathematics, which will be so much harder to learn later in life. At this stage children will absorb all sorts of knowledge no matter what we do, and if they are surrounded by cultural l garbage they will absorb cultural garbage, which is what all too often happens. Education, as Marshal McLuhan once remarked, is civil defense against media fallout. And this was back in the days when “media” did not yet include smartphones, TikTok, and all the other inventions designed to cancel out rational thought. It’s a hundred times truer now.
School doesn’t seem important when you’re young. For me, it was just a distraction from everything really interesting, like going for bike rides in the country, finding strange creatures at the bottom of ponds, and building surrealistic machines out of Meccano. But instead of doing interesting things like those, we were stuck inside a classroom on sunny days, lined up in rows on hard seats, and facing a blackboard full of incomprehensible things – especially incomprehensible to me because I was so short-sighted. Teachers were and had to be disciplinarians. It wasn’t fun because it wasn’t meant to be, and I understand that it is altogether different now, with kinder teachers, laptops, cell phones, and helpful Artificial Intelligence instead of dusty books and authoritarian instructors.
Nothing, literally nothing, is more important than education. If anything will make America great again, it will be more and better education, not more people working down mines or on factory production lines. We are a post-industrial society. The 1950s are over. The future will depend on our expertise in science and technology, whether we like it or not.
Unfortunately, the government seems to have virtually declared war on education – dismantling the Department of Education, rewriting history, undermining science, and limiting free speech.
This apparent hostility to education makes no sense until you consider this statement by former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, echoing something that Thomas Jefferson often said: “An ignorant people can never remain a free people.”
Ignorance is bliss, not for those at the bottom of society, but for those at the top.
