Get ready for a long, grumpy, boring political screed, because there’s
this lady Julianna Smoot, keeps writing to me about my dinner with Barack. No kidding! That’s what she calls him—Barack. There’s another message in my email box this morning:
“John--Have you been thinking about who you'd bring to the next Dinner with
Barack?” Well, I hadn’t been, but
now that I do, I’d like to bring my mother, except that she died thirty years
ago. But he could sure use her
advice, even from the grave, especially if she brought along my old copy of Paddle to the Sea.
The advice would concern education,
one of the President’s supposed priorities as articulated recently in a long
and important speech. The genre
was primarily that of a campaign manifesto, and the venue for its
delivery—always carefully premeditated in today’s political world—was of course
symbolic. The setting was the town
of Osawatamie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt had made an important campaign
speech a century earlier. In the
absurd journalistic word-fad of the moment the press tells us that he was
“channeling” Roosevelt. (You may
recall Jesus’s “channeling” of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount.) The specific site was an auditorium in
a public high school, a venue that underscored one of the President’s most
important themes: the relationship between individual and national economic
success and the quality of American education. To this general subject he devoted seven paragraphs, about a
thousand words, which for purposes of readers’ convenience I have
reproduced below exactly as I find them in the official White House transcript.
I am neither a public figure nor an
expert in public policy. I have,
however, spent much of my life trying to improve my own education, and my
entire professional life encouraging
the education of young Americans.
So I have some considered ideas on the subject.
The President
said some things very much worth saying.
America needs a much larger work
force skilled in mathematics and fundamental science, and in the applied
sciences of engineering. (¶ 2.) The country needs
more good school teachers (¶ 1.)
He deplored the empirical fact that for the past generation so many of
“the best and the brightest” among college graduates have made a beeline from
the Commencement celebrations to Wall Street (¶ 2.) But the punch line of the “education” section of the speech
is the president’s claim of a long-term need to make unspecified “investments”
in American public education—meaning increased federal spending for
education—to be secured by increased taxes on rich people (¶ 5) and the short-term need to suppress
individual Social Security payments, aka
the “payroll tax”, for an additional year (¶ 7).
How
pathetic is this? Forget the simple rhetorical legerdemain
that suggests a non-existent link between a “payroll tax holiday” and the
improvement of education—approximating the current Republican union of a
Canadian pipeline and the continuation of welfare checks for the unemployed. Move directly to the political
prevarication. Of this there are
many varieties, the crude variety of the lie direct being relatively rare. As Orwell pointed out in his famous
essay “Politics and the English Language,” the most insidious form is
linguistic abuse; and in this form President Obama is no less expert than his
adversaries.
Consider his
concept of investments—meaning my tax
dollars at work. The usual
definition of an investment is an outlay of money against a hope of income or
profit. If I buy a quart of
milk for my family’s breakfast for a dollar I am bearing an expense, a portion
of what we call the cost of living, not
making an investment. If buy a
common stock I am. I shall have to continue to spend
money on food indefinitely, but I shall continue to make stock market
investments only so long as experience convinces me of their wisdom. If after five years a quart of milk
costs two dollars but my stock is still worth only a dollar I will not consider
that I have made a wise investment.
The tax-funded federal educational expenses that President Obama insists
on calling “investments” have roughly doubled since 1970. During that time the demonstrated
abilities of American schoolchildren to handle the basic skills of literacy
have remained essentially static.
But as we live in anything but a static world their skills, when
compared with those of their little Finnish and Korean competitors in other
parts of the world, are actually less
satisfactory than they were in 1970.
One of the
main reason lots of people are unemployed is not because there is no work to be
done but because they don’t know enough and/or are insufficiently motivated to
do anything worth even $7.25 an hour to the people who might hire them. Large numbers dropped out of school as
soon as they could. Many others
possess a high-school diploma that cannot be trusted to certify so much as functional
literacy. Lots of them have a
“work ethic” less easy to detect than radiation from outer space.
A subtle
form of political prevarication—practiced ecumenically by our “leaders” of all
stripes—is to talk very earnestly about the wrong problem. Allegedly inadequate resources in
the public schools is the wrong problem. The chief cause of public school
debility and its inevitably dire economic repercussions is the continuing degradation of the American family. Long before education can happen in a
school, however opulently “invested,” it has to be prepared for in a home. There need to be adults in this home who
can and do speak in complete sentences featuring the occasional disyllable, who
have real conversations around a shared dinner table, who show their love for
their kids by taking them to the public library at least as often as they do to
Macdonalds, who show that they recognize the importance of reading and writing
by doing a little themselves. Such
parents insist that their children work hard and if necessarily long on their
homework, and demand professional competence from the public educational
authorities. It is not President
Obama’s fault that these things are not happening; but it is his fault to pretend that our
educational crisis stems from insufficient “investment”.
Here’s the
educational investment my parents
made in 1941, when I was five years old.
It was a pretty good investment, as for $1.95 it secured me a life-time
of well-paid work. They bought me
a brand-new book entitled Paddle to the
Sea. This book, beautifully
illustrated, tells the story of a Canadian Indian boy who lives on Lake Nipigon
in Ontario. He carves and
decorates a miniature canoe, complete with its figure of a paddler, naming the
figure Paddle-to-the-Sea. The
young boy puts the carved boat into a snow bank whence, in the spring thaw, it
washes down from rivulet to branch to creek to river and, eventually, to Lake
Superior. Over a long period
punctuated by dozens of fascinating adventures Paddle-to-the-Sea makes it all
the way through the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean.
For
Depression-era parents of slender means two bucks was not entirely negligible,
but their capital expenditure counted as nothing in comparison with their educational investment. My mother, my father, and my Uncle John—none
of whom had a college degree--each spent long hours teaching me to read this
book. My Aunt Mildred (a
school-teacher) also chipped in. The
words, difficult as they were, were the easiest part. Just beyond them lay vast horizons of geography, forestry,
navigation, climatology, hydrology, and several other academic abstractions for
which I would not for years know so much as the names. My parents didn’t just tell me that such things were important. They loved me enough to show me.
Paddle to the Sea, which is
still in print, won a Caldicott Medal in 1942 and became a big seller. This means that copies of the first
edition are still easily found on eBay.
Now and again I buy one, which inevitably is soon loaned or given away.
Artwork from Paddle to the Sea by Holling Holling (1941)
APPENDIX: FROM THE OSAWATAMIE SPEECH
1. But we need to meet the
moment. We've got to up our game. We need to remember that we can
only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission
-- a national mission. (Applause.)
Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a
higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The
unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the
national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don't
have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn't be laying off good
teachers right now -- we should be hiring them. (Applause.) We shouldn't be expecting less of our schools –-
we should be demanding more. (Applause.)
We shouldn't be making it harder to afford college -- we should be a country
where everyone has a chance to go and doesn't rack up $100,000 of debt just
because they went. (Applause.)
2. In today's innovation economy, we
also need a world-class commitment to science and research, the next generation
of high-tech manufacturing. Our factories and our workers shouldn't be
idle. We should be giving people the chance to get new skills and
training at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines and
semiconductors and high-powered batteries. And by the way, if we don't
have an economy that's built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best and
brightest won't all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance. (Applause.) Because if we
want an economy that's built to last, we need more of those young people in
science and engineering. (Applause.)
This country should not be known for bad debt and phony profits. We should be
known for creating and selling products all around the world that are stamped
with three proud words: Made in America. (Applause.)
3. Today, manufacturers and other
companies are setting up shop in the places with the best infrastructure to
ship their products, move their workers, communicate with the rest of the
world. And that's why the over one million construction workers who lost
their jobs when the housing market collapsed, they shouldn't be sitting at home
with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and our bridges,
laying down faster railroads and broadband, modernizing our schools -- (applause) -- all the things other
countries are already doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their
shores.
4. Yes, business, and not government,
will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people
into the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we've always
come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both
workers and businesses can succeed. (Applause.)
And historically, that hasn't been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt worked
with Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II -- including my
grandfather, Stanley Dunham -- the chance to go to college on the G.I.
Bill. It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son of
Kansas -- (applause) -- who started
the Interstate Highway System, and doubled down on science and research to stay
ahead of the Soviets.
5. Of course, those productive
investments cost money. They're not free. And so we've also paid
for these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share. Look,
if we had unlimited resources, no one would ever have to pay any taxes and we
would never have to cut any spending. But we don't have unlimited
resources. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong
middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make
choices.
6. Today that choice is very
clear. To reduce our deficit, I've already signed nearly $1 trillion of
spending cuts into law and I've proposed trillions more, including reforms that
would lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. (Applause.)
7. But in order to structurally close
the deficit, get our fiscal house in order, we have to decide what our
priorities are. Now, most immediately, short term, we need to extend a payroll
tax cut that's set to expire at the end of this month. (Applause.) If we don't do that,
160 million Americans, including most of the people here, will see their taxes
go up by an average of $1,000 starting in January and it would badly weaken our
recovery. That's the short term.
