"We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo

I just saw, on the same day, clear evidence of what we need to do and what we need to not do.

As to what we need to do, I visited the Kentucky mountain community that I described in my first posting here. I will not now elaborate much about my recent visit -- I'll have a full report later. Suffice it to say that the Linefork community has come together -- youngsters and elders -- in a community-based initiative to restore the American Chestnut tree to the forests. If all goes as well, as I'm confident will be the case, the community will plant some 800 blight-resistant Chestnut seedlings on county owned land adjacent to the Linefork-Kingdom Come Community Center. Community volunteers, with technical support from volunteer foresters representing the American Chestnut foundation, will nurture the seedlings for a decade or more -- until they are large enough to survive without special care. The nuts from this "orchard" will be scattered, mostly by squirrels and other animals, over a wide area. This will be the first large-scale planting of blight-resistant Chestnuts in Kentucky, and the planting will, I'm confident, be an inspiration to lots of other mountain communities. And someday -- long after most of the adult volunteers have passed on -- there will be large numbers of healthy Chestnut trees throughout the Appalachian range.

It is my opinion (I admit I'm biased) that the biggest value of the Chestnut restoration initiative is the community building that is going on; the Linefork people are working together on behalf of everybody. Narrow special interests are absent and, I predict, will stay absent. This is a labor of love. The strengthened community already has  developed community improvements that have little direct relationship to the Chestnut trees; there are bluegrass music events, quilting parties, health and wellness discussions, and more. And young people are active participants in all the initiatives.

When I returned home from my visit to Linefork, I noted three articles about education in the op-ed section of the newspaper. Each article was written by a respected observer, and each writer demonstrated an understanding that students need to be treated as humans rather than as cogs in a robotic system (to borrow from Erica Goldson.) But each article called for changes that require top-down power; and the effect of implementing the changes would be lots of robotics and little humanity.

My purpose in mentioning those articles is not to criticize the writers but is to point out that the culture can cause even the best of us to tend to seek quick and easy solutions. When we ask for quick and easy solutions to problems in education, we are effectively asking for continuing more of the same old top-down mandates; and we are ruling out the kind of community partnerships that I saw at Linefork. And yes, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Just as I was finishing with this posting, I noted on the news that the Mayor of New York is proposing to deny poor people the right to use food stamps to buy soda pop. This proposal, at first glance, might seem to be a good way to combat obesity. But I recall a transaction I once observed in a small grocery store. An elderly man wanted to buy some chewing tobacco but his food stamps could not be used for tobacco. A woman in the store was ready to pay cash for a package of hamburger meat. A deal was struck: the man used his food stamps to buy hamburger meat, the woman used cash to buy chewing tobacco, and the meat was exchanged for the tobacco. This transaction occurred in Kentucky, but New Yorkers surely must be creative enough to end up with soda pop if that's what they want.

The Mayor evidently believes that food stamp bureaucrats are smarter than are citizens who receive food stamps; and his belief on this issue is fundamentally the same belief that is giving us top-down mandates in education. Pogo would agree, I feel sure, that when politicians and bureaucrats think they are smarter than citizens, "They have met the enemy and he is them.”

I'll be attending the fall Chestnut Festival at the Linefork-Kingdom Come Community Center -- Saturday, October 16. I'll have a report for the blog, and it will say (I'm confident) that when a community comes together in the equivalent of an old-fashioned barn raising, good things happen, including treating children as humans.

Bob Cornett