Robert N. Minor says:

Lewis W. Diuguid, Kansas City Star columnist, editorial board member, and vice president for community resources, cares about people. He’s a good friend – of young people, LGBT people, and public education.

Diuguid’s writings encourage us to see what it’s like to be left out of the mainstream and to experience people and institutions still clinging to, while denying, racism, heterosexism, and inhumanity. Readers for whom the shoe apparently fits often pummel him in response.

His insightful book reports from the inside. Diuguid follows a Kansas City, Kansas high school class from its freshman year to graduation. Sitting for hours in classes, he opens up the classroom, its teachers, and its students to cut through the usual claptrap about “problems” with our schools.

As his columns points out, politicians miss the mark when they try to fix things. Conservatives’ long-term goal is actually to substitute private, profit-oriented schools run by desperate corporations. The media repeat ad nauseum politicians’ superficial and barnstorming analyses of our public schools.

“Bogus education reform,” Bush’s unfunded mandate mislabeled “No Child Left Behind,” demands more school testing. It flounders on the failing punishment-oriented nature of most right-wing solutions.

Blaming teachers and unions for problems is standard right-wing strategy. In reality, local school boards often consist of people who lack qualifications for educational decision-making except that they’re parents (which requires no knowledge, training, or experience).

Using typical Bush administration defamation of anyone who questions its agenda, Secretary of Education Rod Paige last year slandered one of the few hopes for maintaining professionalism and standards, by labeling the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”

“Teachers feel that isolation, “Diuguid writes, “as they are bullied by students, bullied by parents, bullied by administrators, and bullied by federal, state and local governments in being required to do more while given no funding or extra help to accomplish each new impossible task.” We put teachers, he observes, “in impossible situations and then we blame them for being there.”

Our consumer-oriented media create a climate opposed to education. Young people are conditioned, a teacher observes, to “think action all the time. They think the only means of function is motion.” So, students aren’t use to sitting calmly and quietly, listening, thinking, and learning.

Parents seldom help, but they blame the schools. A recent Wall Street Journal headline exposes a suburban response: “When High Schools Try Getting Tough, Parents Fight Back.” Get tough on other people’s kids, but don’t fail mine.

“Simply put,” Diuguid notes, “the dysfunctional virus in families has bled into schools.” For some the home is so chaotic, unstable, or pressured that kids can’t think. They’re too busy thinking about what’s going on at home.

As a college professor for 30 years, I’ve seen the results. Many students aren’t sure why they’re in the University. It’s just the next thing you do to “prepare yourself for the world.” They’re not present in the classroom except to find out what they need to get out.

Frankly, it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether they’ve attended public, private, or home schools. Homeschooling isn’t all it’s hyped to be. “Like missionaries,” Diuguid observes, homeschoolers “want the world to see only the benefits and to join them in their crusade.”

Diuguid’s isn’t a “Woe is me tale,” no matter how complex the problems seem to be or how seldom our leaders want to correct the core of what’s wrong. As a parent who’s spent more time in classrooms than most, Diuguid is full of hope.

In his ever fearless but gentle style, he discovers light where few expect it. Our children are not lost. Our teachers are not all jaded. Our schools are not hopeless. They’re just ready for the attention they need.

But we’ve got to stop talking a good line about how important education is (and there’s a lot of “big talk” about education). We must show kids by what we do, and how much we invest in it, that education really matters, that our children matter more than money, time, or business.

We must think in terms of community.

I was once invited to one of those “County Taxpayers Association” meetings. Now, I’ve learned that any organization with the word taxpayer in its name doesn’t really want to pay any,

The inviter said they were going to discuss how to stop paying taxes for schools since their children, like mine, had already graduated.

I declined: “I figure when my son was in school, there were people paying school taxes who didn’t have children in school. It’s fair for me to contribute now.

“Besides, aren’t we members of a community where we educate our children? And the `our’ means more than `mine.’ Supporting our schools is an investment in our future.”

Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas and author of Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society and Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to Be Human.
Rating: 5 / 5