Quite often, I feel that I should take an antidepressant as a preventative measure before reading an editorial by the Plain Dealer’s Kevin O’Brien. Let’s just say that I’ve crossed him off my list of suspects as the perpetrator of the cheery “I Love You Cleveland” graffiti that you see on the side of the old Metro Joe’s and at other spots around my neighborhood. His writing is often >99% problem and <1% solution. That kind of talk I can get for free at my block club meeting.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to argue with a lot of his views on Cleveland’s education woes. In today’s piece, predictably titled “Schools Won’t Get What They Need,” O’Brien once again lambastes both the broken educational system and the dysfunctional community that engendered it. In a Barlett’s-quality aphorism, he quips sardonically: “Success may breed success, but it can’t match failure’s fertility.” Ain’t that the sorry truth?
So here I was this afternoon, making my way with weary resignation through his editorial, when, with only fifty words or so to go O’Brien finally offered something against which I could indignantly rail.
“Cleveland needs a radical, new idea — probably something involving long school days, short summer vacations, dormitories and work-study jobs.”
Of course. What Cleveland needs is a return to that style of quasi-prison schools depicted in Dickens novels. We don’t need no stinking Bill Denihan. We need Wackford Squeers!
Even if O’Brien’s train of thought had not been pulling into the station at that point, I would have jumped anyway. Because one thing my public school children definitely do not need is more public school.
I say this with the most sincere respect to all of the public school teachers and administrators who have gone out of their way to accommodate my children’s needs. And I even grudgingly concur with O’Brien’s implied assessment that there are children whose parents are so disinclined or ill-prepared to parent competently that their children would be safer and more enriched if they were in someone else’s care for a large part of their days and years.
But even O’Brien acknowledges that there are also children in the schools who are motivated and supported. They may not represent a majority in most schools, but they are present in some number everywhere. For the moment. If there is one sure way to extinguish the spark of genius that they represent, it would be to sentence them to even more protracted institutionalization. Even if some factory standard could be achieved by controlling most of the variables in children’s lives, it would mean that we’d need to be satisfied with merely flattening the curve — eliminating the highs as well as the lows.
We do need “a radical new idea.” But if that idea further separates children who are eager to learn from the families that are eager to teach, then it may be radical and new, but still really, really wrong.