Index

Public Education

Busted.  Having not yet been to the principal’s office,  I was curious about it, but this is not the way I wanted to find out.

As a curious kid and a  newly-created programming addict, I had been doing a bit of unauthorized exploring and playing on a couple of local computer systems.  Nothing really illegal, but computer time was expensive back in the ’70s.  I had also showed the normal geek’s level of interpersonal skills and made my erstwhile “partner in crime” into my sworn enemy by hogging all of the fun.  He narc’d me out, and so here I was in the principal’s office.

The principal was a short man we called the Chrome Gnome (behind his back) because of his short physique and the high shine of his pate.  He sat behind an otherwise immaculate monster of a desk, and explained to this shaking kid that what I had done was not acceptable, but that it was not yet a crime. He never raised his voice.  He scared the crap out of me.

He didn’t get my parents involved -  If he had, I would probably still be in jail, my rebellious streak being what it was and is.  I later became a system administrator and was at the front of the first wave of computer types to have to fight with what we now know as a “virus,” instead of one of the first to land in jail for being caught having written one.  I have thought about this incident hundreds of times over my career, and have silently thanked him many times for handling that incident perfectly.

As a product of a public high school and a couple of state colleges, I have to wonder why so many wingnuts are determined to destroy a system that mostly works.  It doesn’t deal well with concentrated poverty, but then nothing else does, either.  It doesn’t turn a bunch of normal kids into Einsteins, but then nothing else does either.  So what is the right attacking the system for?

It seems pretty obvious to me that they want to trash public education precisely because it does work.  It enables a pretty good sized majority of the students that pass through it to live in our society as reasonably productive individuals.  It enables many to go to college and move up the economic scale.  It is one of this country’s strongest protections against a permanent economic stratification.  That makes it a evil thing, apparently.

It also costs the rich folks a few dollars in taxes.  I have heard this dozens of times, and I am sure you have heard some version as well:  “Why should I have to pay for some <racial epithet> to go to school while I have to pay for my kids to go to <expensive private school> to get a half-way decent education?”  Doesn’t that just make your heart bleed?

It sure doesn’t draw any sympathy out of me.  Stupid bastard knows the answer - or at least was told the answer at one time - and asks it anyway.  I know that equal rights and equal opportunity are way out of style right now, but it is still unbelievable to me that someone really believes that he is not in any way responsible for helping someone poorer than he is, and does not understand why he needs to help anyone else get ahead in life.