Jack of Harts

TLDR version:
School is the great equalizer. The great opportunity. The great path to freedom and success in America that anyone can navigate if they have the drive and ambition. It’s as American as apple pie. It’s our greatest gift as adults to the children of the next generation. A chance for them to reach as high as we have.

We have to give it to them.

Full version:
Going to school is a basic part of American life. Much of the rest of the world as well. I will grant that there are some parts of the world where parents would kill to get their kids in school. And others will kill to keep them out of it. Check out what happens in various African countries on a regular basis for that. But for now I speak of American culture.

Going to school is part of growing up. Meeting new people. Learning how to socialize. Becoming your own person in the end. Whether you left school at the end of 5th grade to care for your family fifty or a hundred years ago, or maybe after 8th grade to work the farm, school in America is a universal thing. Graduating the 12th grade is a coming of age ceremony in modern America, the point where a child becomes an adult. Fully 90% of Americans have reached this plateau and entered their new lives as working adults.

We hugged the friends we’d grown up with. We threw our hats in the air. We cheered the coming of our new lives. Some of us went to work. Some of us went to college. Some of us did both. The vast majority of us have that fundamental shared American experience. We went to school together. We made friends and enemies for life. Maybe we kissed someone outside the family for the first time. Some of us played a rousing game of coed baseball. Far more said we did.

Many of us had our best meals of the day at school. Others of us received much needed medical care at school. We exercised at school. Learned to shoot at school. We learned to cook or make furniture. We sang or played an instrument at school. School councilors helped us with our mental health. They found out if our life at home was good or bad. Some of us escaped the worst ghettos in America because we went to school every day and studied hard.

School is the great equalizer. The great opportunity. The great path to freedom and success in America that anyone can navigate if they have the drive and ambition. It’s as American as apple pie. It’s our greatest gift as adults to the children of the next generation. A chance for them to reach as high as we have.

We have to give it to them. We have the open school this fall. Now I don’t know what it will look like. Other countries have done it already. Maybe we look at what they did. Maybe we look at other options. Maybe we distribute it out into smaller schools like we used to. Smaller class sizes, fewer kids in the halls at the same time. I don’t know what our answer will be to the exact bits and pieces of how to make it work.

But we have to make it work. For the children who are becoming adults before our eyes. Who are growing faster than any of us want right now. Who will judge us in the future for what we will do in the coming months.

Don’t listen to those who say we can’t do it. Listen to those who give options and ideas for how we CAN do it. If we do that, we can make our schools great again, and provide the best gift our generations can give to the next generation.

The gift of school.