Legacy for our Children

The most important heritage of all

I get it.  We care about the fate of our children and the future, i.e. what we are leaving them: national debt, environmental nightmares, bio-engineering, new viral menaces, religious fanaticism—and the list could go on.  I don’t hear as much, though, about the one legacy that may be the most precious gift we can offer, and one we can and must deliver: their capacity to face the world with fearlessness and hope. 

It is within our grasp, within our reach, to provide our children, our friend’s children, the world’s children with a great education.  With strength of mind, passion for humane values, confidence in reasoned judgement and the ability to cooperate with others for common goals. 

The legacy of a large national debt is very debatable.  I happen to think it is a chimera, largely advanced as a partisan weapon (but that discussion for another time).  Education, however, is not, or should not be thrown into the political attack-sphere. 

Education is real and happening every hour of every day.  It will have a profound effect on the future.  It can be done very well.  It is within our power to do it much better.  And, of course, we can deprive our children of this gift by doing it badly, or even, hardly at all in many parts of the world---and I the U.S. 

Like so many contemporary issues we are failing to accomplish this “possible,” by staying with the safe and familiar and ignoring the urgings of our hearts, the richness of our technical capabilities, the knowledge we have accumulated through generations of trial and error, and the freshness of new ideas.

First, let’s see it as a global challenge.  No one country can protect itself from millions of desperate people, driven by hunger and fear, as they surge across borders.  No earth-bound planet can survive with millions of people threatening the delicate balance of forces that provide ecological stability. 

Second, it must be understood as preparation for a new kind of life, not simply, as it has been, preparation for a present job environment.  It should and can be:  learning to learn, developing the fullest expression of our humanity, for service, for leisure, for citizenship (in a new way).  Skeptical thinking, excitement for discovery, growth through self-aware experience, creative use of new technologies.  The list of possibilities is long. 

And I do not doubt the strength of resistance to such changes--partisan citizen boards and State legislators, the vested interests and conventional thinking of experts with their “super courses” and profit-based models and high-priced consultancies.

We must develop new career paths in teaching, believe in the potential of that most human of all desires, to see and understand, and develop a nonpartisan willingness to treat education on a par with national defense and sustained prosperity.  In fact, education as a precondition for both.