Speeches I Never Gave: #1

As a member of the National Education Association Executive Committee, I occasionally gave speeches to members and non-members alike. Sometimes these were done with pre-arranged scripts; sometimes, most of it was by my own authoring. There were times, though, when I wanted very much to say something about the way things were going; about policies that I saw as having more import than others did; or just about things that I seemed to notice but it seemed that no one else did. I recorded these in several places, in the hopes that someday, I would be able to add the comments. But the moments passed and we went on to other things. I kept some of these, though, and I want to record them for posterity. This is the first of several. They're lying around in boxes and garages and inside notebooks, so I may write them here as I find them, corrections for spelling and rearrangement of paragraphs notwithstanding.

These may not be dated, but perhaps you can tell when I wrote them out of the context. Regardless, they begin where they begin, and end where they end. If things don't exactly tidy-up at the conclusion, it's because we went on to other things and I didn't return to that earlier thinking, if for no other reason than I knew very well that I would never be able to say it anyhow.

Until now, that is.

#1

A Conversation on National Priorities:

How to Care for Generations to Come

We need a conversation about national priorities, and the NEA needs to lead it.

We need to ask why this country is increasingly ungovernable.

We need to ask why perfectly reasonable people insist on having their own way--through the politicization of our courts; the suspension of civil liberties; the intimidation of those who have an alternative view--things which have filtered down into our schools as new staples of public policy.

Whatever happened to moderation? To pragmatism? To compromise?

We need to ask the free market advocates to show us where their thinking has solved our largest problems--not the least of which is public education.

We need to ask why the magical process if immigration has been trivialized into a sideshow and criminalized.

We need to ask why growing thousands of our people, young and middle-aged, are dying in a war which we began for obscure and ultimately false and counter-productive reasons--and why our schools are being used to drag thousands more into it.

This is a larger battle than just educating kids. It is about whether or not we solve problems individually, with each person fending for him- or herself--and all the selfish divisiveness that that brings--or whether we transcend ourselves from, as Bill Moyers puts it, "live and let live" to "live and help live."

The hypercapitalist, free market ideologues say that no one should need anyone except in the narrowest sense of economic profitability--that, contrary to John Dunne, each person really is an island unto themselves, and can maximize their existence in this world, for their relatively brief time on it, by setting themselves against others in the classic Darwinian struggle, and that government needs to stay away from that struggle. That is one form of what some call libertarianism.

But there is another kind libertarianism that refutes that argument. It is a kind that demands freedom from those institutions that the previously mentioned form of libertarianism would intend to glorify--mainly, corporate interests and the maximization of profitability for the absolute minimum numbers of us.

Those who are left behind to fight each other for the crumbs on the table, who are not obsessed with riches but who need a basic level of sustainability and who desire a lower level of satisfaction, but who also feel that our contributions deserve that satisfaction, can do nothing less than turn to a larger force to guarantee that our pursuit of happiness and contentment is at least achievable--that it will not be absorbed by someone else's insatiable greed.

We've been around long enough to know that corporate profits will only trickle down, and that whatever empty promises that have been made will only amount to that trickle. This is how and why the middle class disappears, and how political polarization is preceded by economic.

The only way to stop this erosion is not to warn government away from this fray, but to elect competent, accountable government representatives to give us just enough control to prevent this persistent abuse. Just enough, mind you. In no place should it be overdone.

What does that mean for people like us? Our schools should be operated and taught by people with sufficient training in that realm--on this, most people agree.

Anybody can run a school in the same way anybody can run a restaurant, but it gives people comfort and staying power to know that the institution is in the hands of those who originally cared enough to have put in the time and study to learn how to do it competently and even better than that. But we have also liked and cultivated the relative freedom teaching has given us to explore the possibilities of the intellect; creativity, critical thinking, and experimentation.

We need a shared purpose, a shared vision, a guarantee of equal opportunity and fairness, and government institutions that secure them. The institutions most effective in doing so, on a day-by-day basis, as it has been for decades upon decades, are our public schools.

The rules of respect under the law and tolerance and flexibility of treating the just and the unjust begin and end inside school walls. The maintenance of basic civil and human rights against the erosion of them by forces as natural as those rights themselves, begins and ends inside those walls.

That maintenance is not a natural act. It takes work and devotion to a world unlike that of Burger King, where someone has pretended that we each can "have it your way."