During last night’s debate when free public college was discussed, Bernie Sanders stressed how much it would positively affect elementary school aged children. This vital point fell on deaf ears conditioned by our culture’s selfish concept that we pay taxes only to educate our own biological children. As a nation, we have forgotten that a free public education is meant to provide our future citizenry with the knowledge they will need to secure the future of the republic. When even the Democratic front-running presidential candidate plays the GOP resentment card of not wanting to pay for Trump’s kid’s college education, it buys into the idea that a college education is a privilege not a right and that the nation has nothing to gain by investing in all our youth.
We forget that it is everyone’s responsibility to see that everyone’s children have a shot at succeeding because we are a nation and not individual dog-eat-dog economic units striving to outdo our neighbors. So we allow privileged parents to dodge this most sacred obligation by allowing them to pull their taxes out of the public system meant to nurture all of our children to pay for their own children’s privileged education. We don’t fix the system; we abandon it and all the children whose parents cannot afford private school tuition.
We forget that children are human beings. We forget that they listen at the door and hear what they should never hear as adults speak of hopelessness, poverty, and perhaps even the child’s own ability to succeed. These moments are shards of broken glass that lodge in their hearts, lowering their expectations and rendering stillborn any dreams they might have dreamed about their future. How would it look, asks Bernie Sanders, if young children grew up in a nation where there was a clear path for them to succeed?
In our culture, we accept the idea that there are few winners and many losers. Cream rises to the top, we say, and those who do not succeed are unworthy. We apply this stringent yardstick of success to our children which stunts their growth as human beings. We ignore the fact that there are no “at risk youth” but “youth placed at risk” by societal factors such as poverty, poor parenting, and the prohibitive cost of higher education.
One seminal study looked closely at those resilient children who succeeded against all odds. Was it simply superior inborn character or were there other factors outside the child that made all the difference?
- They had at least one positive role model who supported their development of trust, autonomy, and initiative.
The study discovered that these resilient children had at least one adult who cared about and connected with that child whether it was a coach, an aide, a cafeteria worker, or a teacher. In our under-resourced conveyor belt schools, staffing is poor and does not allow for this kind of mentoring. Middle school is a critical time and yet scant budgets force mega Middle Schools where the possibility of any child forming a supportive relationship is even more remote.
In my public school career, I never worked with mainstream students, so I was able to fill this need with those children who qualified for individual attention. “My kids” were always on the fringes whether they were classified as special education, English-as-a-second language, or youth-placed-at-risk. I remember a conversation with my favorite special ed teacher about one high school boy with autism who was blooming because I’d had the time to arrange a one-credit one-on-one class with an art teacher to mentor him in his artistic focus. We both looked out the door at all the students passing by and she remarked, “Don’t they all deserve it?” They do but they do not get it.
Is Bernie right when he asserts that free college can make a difference in the life of even elementary students? My long experience says yes. I remember in particular a third grade Hispanic boy I had in summer school. While everyone else was struggling with the multiplication table, this boy was reveling in long division and seemed not to miss the short Oregon summer outside our windows. When I looked at this student, I saw the obstacles awaiting him in his family’s poverty and the cultural norm of his peers to whom loving school was not “cool”. During class, I cut him out of the herd to take him down to the library and as we walked down the hall, I spoke to him as a human being and not just as a mindless kid. I told him that he had a beautiful mind and that college was in his future. I told him that his friends would be jealous of him and try to get him to hate school. I told him that there is free money for college for poor kids. I knew I had hit my mark when he checked out a book on wolves, which I had told him that I loved, then gave it to me to read first. I transferred to middle school that fall, so never saw him again, yet I had done my best by him to plant these seeds and hoped that others like me would nurture it.
Another protective factor that this study found which fostered resilience was this:
- They had at least one skill that gave them a sense of pride and acceptance within their peer group
There are few adults who are equally proficient in all spheres, yet, we expect children to measure up in all school subjects. Working with my special education students, I constantly ran up against teachers with no special education training at all whose expectations were rigid and excluded my kids from success or who had no idea how to adjust their lesson plans to include these students. Living in a university town, it would have been easy for me to get a teaching degree, yet I did not. I knew that I did not have it in me to tell a child that--because he flunked a couple quizzes in my class--he was forbidden to play in the Saturday soccer game which is the one skill he has that feeds his self-worth.
Most of my kids never listened to the daily bulletins about various colleges coming to school to recruit students or opportunities for scholarships. They already knew that nothing in these announcements had anything to do with them. Going to college was never in the cards for them. What Bernie is talking about here is raising American children’s expectations. He is talking about giving them a future and investing in our nation’s future.
America is a hard unloving parent who throws its children off the dock into the deep water and blames them if they drown. Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders is the loving Grandfather who stands up for, believes in, and fights for all our children. It is small wonder that they love him.