Public Education’s Purpose

Most of goober/rural and suburban America is in a brainless anti-education trance in 2024. Like my current hometown, this movement is disguised by code names like “Moms for Liberty,” the “1776 Project,” and other quasi-patriotic sounding names echoing similar Brownshirt movements from 1936 Nazi Germany. These Soviet-patriots are even using the same fascist tactics to harass and threaten board members. I’ve been here before and it wasn’t pretty. In the 1950s, in many school districts, the Christian-right and other generally uneducated and superstitious deplorables were so terrified of evolution and science education and what it might mean for their easy money that they dumbed-down public education to “readin’, ritin’, and ‘ritmatic.”

Then came Russia’s Sputnik and the whole half-witted portion of the country freaked out and started buying bomb shelters. The US military discovered that what passed for “scientists” and “engineers” from the majority of public schools were barely able to mechanically manipulate a slide rule, let alone do complex calculations with that device. So, the federal government and states tried a variety of mostly-unsuccessful tactics to crank up US education standards. And religion, as usual, freaked out and fought back. Mostly, what that accomplished was creating education ghettos across the country. In California and the Left Coast, where higher education was publicly-supported so strongly that anyone who could support themself and could afford college, produced high-tech idea generators like . Places where religion was dominant, like the Midwest and Southeast . . . not so much. The end result has been economic deserts where poverty, ignorance, and social and economic inequality are accepted norms.

Public education is not and should not be intended to support and promote parental “beliefs.” Good parents, probably about 1-10% of the breeding herd, hope their children will be smarter, happier, better educated, and more competent than their parents. Awful parents are jealous of their kids’ successes and terrified that their children will grow up to realize their parents are clueless, arrogant, entitled morons. As a friend recently reminded me, the purpose of public education, though, is to provide society with citizens capable of making intelligent decisions, supporting themselves and their families, adapting to changing technology and new information, and promoting the improvement of the culture. That is the ONLY reason that “childless cat ladies,” other taxpaying childless adults, wealthy people who can afford to sent their children to private schools, and seniors can be rationally required to pay for public education.

The only way a culture can provide that kind of public education is by supporting schools that protect teachers from idiot parents, regressive school boards, incompetent city management or school administrators, and that pay teachers enough for them to make the sacrifices necessary to be good teachers. In most US public schools, the starting salary for teachers is almost half of that for police and fire employees. If a country wanted to make a strong statement of values and priorities, that is about as blatant as it gets.

Personally, I’m tired of hearing about “public education’s failures.” What needs to be said loudly and often is that parents are failing their children and the conservative cowards are failing the country. (Remember, the word “conservative” means “averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.” There is nothing courageous about resisting change since change is an inevitable variable of life.) George Washington wrote, ““The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society.” That was not a statement from a conservative, but someone who understood that change is a constant and a scientific “experiment,” such as democracy, has to be adaptable and constantly evaluating the outcomes of that experiment. Without a high quality public education, independent of politics and corruption, a society will quickly evolve into the kind of tyranny that the United States was designed to resist.

Pet Calculus

NOTE: I wrote this rant the day Luci was dying, at the end of August. Then, it sat in my computer waiting for either exposure or deletion. Since I still miss my big guy and his death still stings, I went for exposure. So, I swapped the current verbs for past tense and shipped it.

In late August. I watched another of the many pets we have survived suffer the end of his life. Like our last cat, we had Luci (short for “Lucifer,” a character in one of Ms. Day’s favorite cartoon series) for about a year. He was a shelter cat who suffered a lot of unintentional abuse and misery in his life before us. We don’t know much of this story, but his previous owner, an older woman, died in her house/apartment and her body wasn’t discovered for several days. Luci wasn’t discovered in the house/apartment for an unknown but extended time after she had been removed. When a company was hired to empty the property, those folks found him grossly overweight (he’d opened a large bag of Purina Cat Chow and helped himself) and his long black fur was matted into dense dreads. A police officer delivered him to the shelter and while he struggled, he did not bite or scratch her. Our best guess was that he was a Norwegian Forest Cat or very close to that. Depending on the season, he weighed between 16 and 18 pounds and it was all muscle. He weighed closer to 30 pounds when he was brought to the shelter. His fur was so messed up that he had to be sedated and shaved. After all that, he was in a tiny cage in the shelter for more than 6 months before Ms. Day decided to adopt him.

When we brought him home, he was a mess. He was terrified, disoriented, and still never made the slightest attempt at lashing out from fear or anger. He would struggle to get away from us, but never using any of his formidable weapons: 1” fangs and claws nearly that long. For a big cat, he could hide incredibly well. It was several months before he would willingly be touched, but slowly he began to sit beside me while I wrote in my corner of our dining area. Ms. Day says we bonded because we both come from train wreck histories. All my life, I was the black sheep of my family and Luci was, literally, a black cat. We are both introverts, easily overwhelmed by people and situations. He always fled whenever I would grab a guitar, so he had far better musical taste than me. He was a shop cat, there was nothing he liked more than to relax in our work areas while we work.

But he was on his 3rd urinary tract infection in less than 3 months. He battled through the first two, but the last one was his last. There is math involved in living with a pet, especially one you unwillingly become attached to. The area-under-this-curve is the pleasure you derive from their lives vs the pain you will suffer when that ends. Ms. Day says she looks at their short lives as “brief, beautiful flowers.”

I have outlived so many people and animals in my 76 years that I do not have the emotional resources to do that again. When their lives end, I am stuck with wishing it was me and not them and feeling like my heart has been ripped out. Nothing about the brief time I had with them compensates for their loss. Fuck “better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.” I can see how that philosophy could work with “beautiful flowers,” but not with a living, thinking, responsive being that had become my friend and, even, family. As you can see from the chart above, the area under the “misery” curve is substantially greater (longer and deeper) than the brief pleasure of that life, if the life is a short one. And the fact is clearly that we suck at keeping cats alive and healthy.

These are awful times in history and, particularly in this country. Half of the country is unable to tell fact from fantasy; and they are proud of that fact. I am incredibly tired of being disappointed when I discover someone I once thought might be a decent human being is a Trumper. I try to keep a sense of humor about the decline and fall of the United States, but it is hard for me not to look at the sky and hope for a planet-killing asteroid. The way we have chosen to kill ourselves is going to be slowly, painfully, stupidly and sadly and I’m not up for that.

It is embarrassing and unrelentingly painful how much I miss my big, beautiful, black cat. It has been more than a month since he died and I still catch myself hoping to see him bounding around the kitchen when I wake up, trying to get me to let him outside on his leash to watch the sunrise and the life in our backyard. I miss how he would hug me, with no claws involved, when I’d pick him up to carry him outside or bring him back in at night. I miss his silent presence. I miss him sleeping, purring loudly beside me in my office while I write. I miss his undeniable sense of humor and intelligence.

The pets we’ve lost in the past 3 years have given me an appreciation for the wild hope that there is an afterlife. I, honestly, have fewer than a handful of humans who I’d like to see after death, but at least a dozen beautiful, soulful animals have passed through my life and I can almost imagine an eternity with them that would be pretty fantastic. 

When people ask “If you miss him so much, why don’t you get another cat?” my answer is “I don’t want another cat, I want Luci.” Irrational, I know. Even delusional, I suspect.