School’s Out

With this semester already cancelled and the prospect of students in physical schools at the start of the fall seeming more and more remote, I've been thinking about education today. I would hope that the amount of parents who have found themselves homeschooling, and the difficulties of handling a class size of even one or two, would make us appreciate America's 3.2 million teachers when this is over but I'm not holding my breath. Teachers are tireless, under-appreciated and absolutely essential to our lives. They are often scapegoated, 33% of them will quit after 3 years and you are more likely to come across a teacher than someone of any other profession on an online dating site. 

The word teach comes from Old English, "tæcan," which means to show, demonstrate or, importantly, persuade. It's this last bit that separates teach from a different Old English word, "læran," also a verb for instructing, where we get our word for "learn." I'm assuming that it will not amuse new homeschool teachers to discover that the word school comes from the Greek word for "free time."

Of course, I am hoping for a swift end to the COVID pandemic for everyone but particularly for students. School is an unbelievably important place, where the majority of people can recall 90% of their classmates even 35 years after graduating. Gandhi, who advised us to "learn as if you will live together," noted that right education is the key to a functioning democracy. It's also a time when people develop their characters. Richard Nixon was so afraid of his law school grades that he broke into the Dean's office and discovered he was at the top of his class. I know it's hard to believe that Richard Nixon would do something untoward because of paranoia but their you have it. In other's cases, school has little bearing on future success. We've all heard the stories of Michael Jordan not initially making his high school basketball team (true) and Einstein failing at grade-school math (not true. "Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus," he said when asked about it, a little arrogantly, it must be said) but Winston Churchill really did struggle in school, finishing dead last among all students in his first year at Harrow, the prestigious London boarding school. School is naturally informative for teachers as well. Gene Simmons, the long-tongued bassist of KISS, taught grade school in Harlem before he was fired for replacing Shakespeare with Spider-Man comic books. Sting taught at a convent school. Art Gunfunkel was teaching math in Connecticut while "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was on the charts, which is the ultimate math teacher flex. Presidents John Adams and Lyndon Johnson were former teachers as were writers Robert Frost, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King and William Golding, whose The Lord of the Flies was well-informed about what little shits children can be in groups. Pol Pot was a geography teacher before he went on to slaughter 21% of his countrymen. I wonder how he'd feel that so few Americans can find Cambodia on a map.

That's not to say that we are poorly educated. Americans spend more on education than any other country. Our children are falling behind compared to students of certain other nations but with the four highest ranked universities in the world (to say nothing of 8 of the top 10 and 16 of the top 20), it's hard to argue that America lacks for good schools. It's the reason why so many from around the world long to be educated here, with roughly 800,000 new foreign university students a year, making our great schools dependent on foreign tuition. It's with this in mind that I was disappointed by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton's remarks last week that suggested that Chinese students be limited in their access to our schools. Cotton has a long history of sinophobic saber rattling but he forgets that American ideology is an automatic minor for every major a foreign student receives from an American university. This was the very reason the Soviet Union barred its students from studying in the West, it makes America a real place and exposes the misinformation their government may be spreading about the USA. It smacks of insecurity to not believe that our way of life will appeal to a foreign student, even from a hostile country.

Cotton should heed the words of a different senator of Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, whose scholarship program is the premier cultural exchange programs in the world. "The Fulbright Program's mission," he said, "is to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship." That's the value of education. Will some Chinese students use their Western education to better their countries? Probably, and good for them if they can, but it is more likely they will gain a perspective on a part of the world that has been secret to them their whole lives. The name of Boko Haram, the jihadist terror organization that has haunted Nigeria and other parts of Africa for years, including the kidnapping and abuse of school girls, means "Western education is forbidden" in Hausa. Why would a U.S. Senator want to protect a hostile nation from a weapon so fearsome a terrorist group calls it out in their own name? It's as if the Marine Corps' motto was not "Semper Fedelis," Latin for "always faithful," but was instead "Nos Terrebis Cubanus Gerbillinae," Latin for "we are frightened of Cuban gerbils" and Castro was like "We need to stop Americans from adopting our gerbils!" We are great thinkers. We have wonderful schools with even greater teachers and they need to reopen—for everyone.