Education and Community

I said it in Boxing Day, and I'll start again with it here. If there is one notion that underpins my self-sufficiency project, it is this:

There's an awful lot of important and useful stuff I didn't learn when I was growing up.

In writing that, I was thinking about the fact that my education - an excellent one - focused on advanced academics at the expense of practical knowledge. I never took a class in which I was asked to build anything, or plumb anything, or sew anything, or change my oil, or cook anything, or learn how to organize my finances. All of which are skills that people in our culture will require at some point or other. I believe that the rationale was that, as a college-bound, future white-collar worker, I would be paying other people to do those things for me.

Now, a couple of decades out of high school, I see that focusing on academics at the expense of other lessons hasn't been in my best interest. And I'm setting out to fill in those holes.

This post isn't about me, however. It is about the next generation, and it starts with this truth:

Focusing on academics at the expense of other realms of knowledge does not produce well-rounded adults.
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Here is another truth: Money is tight.
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Last night there was a school board meeting at our local school (which provides education for kids from Kindergarten through the eighth grade). The purpose was to start a discussion about which programs are targeted for "increased efficiency" so that our supervisory union (sort of a district) can cut 1.59% from its budget as (sort-of) required by Challenges for Change.

It's not quite required. It's apparently voluntary with the the not-so-gently implied subtext that, if we don't comply voluntarily, sterner measures will be taken.

Just like dinner time at our house.

In any event, Challenges for Change specifies that savings will be generated by making government more efficient, not by decreasing the services that are offered.

There are a lot of adjectives that I want to be able to apply to the education my children receive: excellent; well-rounded; challenging; enjoyable; useful.

I'm not so sure that "efficient" is one of them.

For me, "efficient" conjures up images of Big Macs and factory farming. Of a one-size-fits-all approach. Imagine how efficient our school system could be if all the children it served needed the exact same resources! If they being raised and taught so that they can step into roles as interchangeable cogs in a machine!

But they aren't.

They are kids. And they will grow up to be adults who need to be able to step into all the varied roles that our world requires.
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But, money is tight. So we need to use it more wisely. More efficiently.
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The principal - whose shoes I wouldn't want to be in right now - identified several programs that could be made more efficient without decreasing services. A feat that will be accomplished by eliminating some positions entirely, stretching the remaining staff tighter to cover the absolute necessities, and then eliminating what can't be covered.

Areas that will take the hit: nursing, health, and physical education (where p.e. teachers will pick up some of the health classes); guidance and therapy; music; and para-educators.

None of these programs will be eliminated entirely. There will still be music. There will still be a nurse. There will simply be fewer people to staff these programs.

Services will not be diminished.

Reduction without diminishing.

After they pull that off, I'll wait anxiously for them to pull a bunny out of a top hat.
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What is the goal of education?

Our most recent President Bush once observed, "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"

I disagree. I think that is all too often the only question that is being asked. Children take tests. And we see test results. And schools are rated accordingly.

We aren't just raising children to take tests, though. Or, at least, we shouldn't be. We should be raising kids to step into their roles as members of our future communities.

You know what communities need? Communities need to be healthy. They need music and theater, and drama projects that they work on as a group. They need therapy for individuals and families who are struggling with emotional issues which - left unaddressed - might boil up into larger problems. They need as many people around as possible to pitch in and help with one-on-one attention so that no one falls behind.

We shouldn't only ask if our children are learning. We should ask if they are being given the time, tools, and attention they need to become full members of the community in which we want to live.

Not just my children. Or your children. Not just the ones we love.

Every child.

Even if you don't agree with their parents. If you think their parents are shiftless and lazy and should just get a job. Each and every child in America today will be a part of the larger community in which you live tomorrow.

What kind of place do you want it to be?
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A woman said to me, regarding the cuts, something to the effect of, "I'm glad we home school. This won't impact us."

I disagree.

Unless you are planning to never let your children - or the adults they become - interact within an extended community beyond your home, or your private school, what happens in the public education system will impact them.

It will impact all of us.

We cannot pick and choose the individuals in our world whose choices and actions will be the ones that effect us the most. So, please, let's all choose to do the best job we can to make sure that every child has the support, and resources, and nurturing, and creative outlets, and therapy, and food that they need to become the community members that we want and need them to be.

Starving them of these things might be more efficient. It might be cheaper now. But the long-term costs, the externalized costs - as with factory farming or a world of processed Big Macs - will be greater in the end.
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But there's no money. Times are tight. Something has to be cut.

Under the plan presented last night, the children still have some music classes. There is still a nurse if someone throws up or gets hurt. Hopefully the children who need therapy will find some other programs and not fall through the cracks.

I hope they don't fall through the cracks.

We were reminded again and again that our district - our school - actually already had more of these things than are standard in our state. That we should be willing to do with less.

Maybe if the people who have to make these difficult decisions were reading this, they would toss the tough calls back to me. "You make the cuts. You find the 1.59% and get rid of it."

I don't know. I don't know what program I would cut from a school.

I don't have the answers. I'm not alleging that I do.

We don't know what program will inspire one child in our community to greatness. It could be academics. Or sports. Or the chance to sing a song in a musical.

We also don't know what absence will be the crack that leads to tragedy. The lack of available nursing care at a crucial moment. Or a teacher's aide who can take the extra time to work with a child who is falling behind. Or a therapist who is available to connect a child with the counseling that they need.

What is the possible toll of all that efficiency?
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Money is tight.

It is a reality for families. For our town. For our state. For our country.

I don't have the answers.

But I want to say this: Our public schools are the garden in which we grow the individuals who will sustain our future communities. Our future country.

To restrict what they need - to be efficient with their education - is to starve our future.

It isn't simply a question for our town - for our school board. We should ask our administrators to be as creative as possible, but we can't lay the onus of these cuts at their feet. Just as it is difficult - sometimes impossible - for individuals to behave in ways that differ from the dictates of our larger culture, it is hard for schools to operate outside the dictates of districts, states, and our federal government.

Rarely is the question asked: Are America's children learning the skills they need to become a community?

Maybe we should start asking that question.
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There's an awful lot of important and useful stuff I didn't learn when I was growing up.

I didn't learn to sew. But I'll be okay in the end.

What won't today's children learn? What happens if what they don't learn - what they don't receive from their education - impacts all of us?

Piggies

I have no desire to own pigs. Pork is great - I'm all for it - but pigs seem like a ton of work.

Yesterday, however, I was cleaning out our fridge and it made me think of pigs.

Cleaning out the fridge is a depressing task because I am confronted with the large amount of food that we waste. Some of it is just little bits and noshes: the last dregs of mac and cheese that Will always seems to squirrel away back there; a few bites of a sandwich; half an apple that I intended to serve for dinner and then forgot about. Some of it, however, is large: a container of yogurt I forgot, half a pizza that never made it to the table as leftovers, a bag of shredded cabbage that should have become pad thai.

The cabbage and the apples will make their way to our compost pile. They will at least have a second life as nutrients in our garden, feeding the next generation of veggies that will wilt and decay in our fridge.

The pizza, yogurt, and mac and cheese just end up in our garbage. A complete and utter loss.

As I throw these foods away, they remind me of the money we spent (and the time spent earning that money) in order to purchase them; of the time, labor and energy that went into growing them; and of the resources that went into packaging them and delivering them from the field and factory to the grocery store.

If I don't ponder it deeply, the action of throwing away food - taking a piece of Tupperware out of my fridge, peaking timidly inside, wrinkling my nose at the smell of moldy chili or old eggs, and then dumping it in the trashcan - doesn't seem like much more than an unpleasant chore. But when I think of the resources that went into what I have just thrown away... it saddens me.

One answer to this problem is to do a better job of meal planning and eating leftovers. I try. I really do. And if you guys have suggestions on how to make that happen, I'm all ears. Because I suck at it. Somehow, planning meals just results in the production of more formal, well-planned meals, which in turn results in more partial, leftover meal fragments in sadly rotting in their cold Tupperware coffins at the end of the month.

What? Yes. Of course I clean out my fridge monthly. Don't you?

Rick tells me that his mom used to take all the leftovers they produced, whatever they were, and put them in their freezer in a big container. Then, once the container was full, she would take the whole thing and dump it into the crockpot and cook it into a meal that she called "FreezerPot," a meal that reflects her vast and wise sense of thrift.

I believe that this meal worked for them in large part because my mother-in-law's (very fine) cooking tends towards mostly foods of a similar style, so that FreezerPot probably would have contained some veggies, some spaghetti, some ground beef, and maybe a little rice. Things that don't clash when combined.

FreezerPot in my house would likely end up being some unholy combination of enchiladas, pad thai, hummus, tortellini, potato soup, yogurt, and a chunk of bleu cheese. I don't think I could convince myself to eat it, let alone the kids. Dire threats would be involved. It would be the thing that my children would use to underscore the unpleasantness of their childhoods. For them there would be no stories about how hard life was when they had to walk uphill both ways to school. Instead, they would talk about the scars created by being forced to eat barftastic, pan-ethnic FreezerPot.

You know who would probably dig barftastic, pan-ethnic FreezerPot? A pig. A pig would be all over that action.

When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria had two large garbage cans. One was for containers and paper bags: the general trash stuff. The other was for slops. Looking in the slops can always, for me, produced a dire sense of nausea that I am sure is familiar to anyone who has a suggestible stomach. It looked barftastic. But it was all technically edible. I don't know who said it or how this information to me, but I remember at some point being told that these slops were, "for the pigs."

Now, I'm not going to dwell too deeply on the fact that there were probably very few pigs in North Dallas by the time I was in elementary school. When I was younger there were farms within a few miles of us just north of LBJ. My Montessori preschool was nestled amongst them until they were razed to make way for the Galleria shopping mall. After that, it seems like getting slops to the nearest pig would be something of a commute. So I don't know how far these fine food items might have had to travel before they were united with swine who could appreciate them. But the intention was there. And it made sense. Even as a Kindergartener, I could see that one meal at a small elementary school cafeteria could produce of an awful lot of food waste.

Pigs, like us, are omnivores. And I am led to believe that they aren't very discriminating about what they get all omnivorous with. Giving food that has passed beyond my tolerance for consumption to a pig recycles the wasted calories of spoiled yogurt into the potential calories of bacon. (Mmmmm bacon). Which makes way more sense than just throwing those calories in a trash bag and taking them to the dump to be forever entombed in a landfill.

Of course, in order to make use of this fantastic calorie-recycling program, there needs to be a pig somewhere. Which brings me back to my initial reluctance to personally take on the responsibility of a pig. They are big and they have needs. I've already got two small people and a cat with needs that I don't seem to be able to meet on a day-to-day basis. I don't need to add a pig to this mix.

Therefore, this is not a post that is going to come to a simple conclusion.

At present, I am left with a general notion that there is more to explore on this topic. As much as it seems like our family wastes a lot of food, it isn't enough to actually feed a pig. So maybe I need to find more families that want to band together to slop and care for a pig. Because who wouldn't want that, right? It's the perfect project of community responsibility and reward. Pass on your food scraps, clean out the pen once or twice a month and, at the end of the year, we can have a luau!

Or not.

It is almost certainly the case that I would be better off entirely by finding someone who is already raising pigs and providing my food waste to them, excising the guilt without the responsibility.

Which sort of sums up the American style of penance, doesn't it? There's a post topic for another day.

While driving in the car with my family yesterday, I asked Rick if he had ever had a slop bucket at his elementary schools. After all, he grew up in Kansas, Colorado, and Georgia. Surely they would have had just as much of a shot of having pigs that needed slopping as we did in Dallas. Right? He just looked at me like I was crazy.

But L piped up from the back seat. She knew exactly what I was talking about: they have a slop bucket at her current elementary school. And, in truth, I would be astounded to learn that there isn't more than one pig currently living somewhere in our town. This place isn't North Dallas.

So maybe the answer to my issues about waste (beyond reduction - which I still need to figure out) is to find out if there is someone, or "Some Pig" in our neighborhood who would be delighted with the occasional gift of FreezerPot.