(That's a movie quote, read on to make it make sense.)
The idea of community colleges (and education generally) as the engine of economic progress and social mobility came up in comments here [1], and I think it's worth many separate blogposts and discussions. I mean only to start it off with this one, but I feel the need to set the table with a little common context first, because I've been struggling mightily to find it in a few other discussions lately, and maybe I'm not the only one. Even if I am, that counts for something, right?
I think reasonable folks understand that ideas, beliefs and practices ought to stand on their own, independent of our personal feelings about any idea's advocates and detractors. Yet I've drawn a couple of dismissive responses here because I am a "homeschooling" parent, as if that were a disqualifier to be taken seriously in mainstream education or progressive discussion of any kind. And even among context-sharing progressives, political thought about education so predictably veers off into the hypocrisy of personal affinity and animosity (for these guys, against those guys) rather than doing the tough work of separating our lizard brain instincts and impressions from our highest-order systems thinking and power of story.
So merely to balance that wrong assumption --but not to confer any special authority on myself, even though I'm pretty sure someone or other will accuse me of that -- I state for the record that I wrote my doctoral dissertation in education leadership and policy on community college effectiveness criteria; my major professor was considered the father of Florida's community colleges, James L.Wattenbarger [2], who was a longtime colleague of my management professor dad. (They also shared demography as white southern officers and gentlemen, along with generational history and education-economic-patriotic values as children of the Great Depression, both of whom joined the Air Force and later studied their way to doctorates and academic careers.)
And we all three shared the organizational culture approach to studying, understanding and reforming education institutions.
Dr. Wattenbarger's doctoral dissertation at the University of Florida outlined a master plan that the state used in 1955 to create the modern community college system. Under his guidance, enrollment at community colleges in Florida increased to more than 75,000 in 1967 from fewer than 3,000 just a decade earlier.
Dr. Wattenbarger was born in Cleveland, Tenn., a child of the Depression, and was a 1941 graduate of Florida's first community college: Palm Beach Junior College, now named Palm Beach Community College. He was inspired to expand the community college system in large part because he was a personal beneficiary of it, said his son Frank.
After serving for several years in consulting, Dr. Wattenbarger returned to the University of Florida in 1968 and helped to establish the Institute of Higher Education, created to discover ways for colleges and universities to operate more efficiently.
Just as it would be wrong to agree automatically with someone based on personality, credentials or experience, it is wrong to automatically disagree with me or marginalize my thinking simply because we "homeschool" our own children. (Unschooled Favorite Daughter has been a thoroughly engaged community college student since she was 15, and is this very minute in her honors literature seminar across town -- shouldn't that make my education commentary more credible, rather than less so??)
Education as perennial political prey has always been with us. But Education and Schooling rode off in two different directions so long ago that by now, they are strangers unlikely ever to meet up again with common interest. Like, hmmm, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [3] splitting off from the rest of their gang to confuse and divide the posse tracking them, only to see ALL their pursuers let the rest of the gang ride off without so much as a backward glance of concern.
For my half-century of life, the political posse has been riding hard after Schooling, as if Education wasn't important and could be let go without consequence.
So I don't hang with the posse any more. To me it's painfully clear that the posse will never catch education by riding after school.
Public education is so much more than school, and public school is so much less than education.
If Culture Kitchen is ready to discuss education and schooling as it relates to progressive thought and politics, I propose that we do it differently than it is done elsewhere [4]. Now that would be progressive -- I think this could be the time and place to explore some unarguably radical education paths not yet taken, ideas that fit our principles without necessarily fitting any past political or educational mold. We could actually think for ourselves as Thinking Citizens [5] in productive, progressive ways of our own, not what the Party wants us to support because it wins elections. Or else I guess we could just keep on sending our favorite horses out onto the track to go round and round, and put them down without pity or a backward glance when they break a leg a la Barbaro [6] (or shoot themselves in the foot-in-mouth, a la Biden [7]?)
"The difference between brilliant and mediocre thinking lies not so much in our mental equipment as in how well we use it."
--Dr. Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats [8]
It might take all Six Thinking Hats to do it justice [9], and we'd have to stick together, let the kneejerk labeling and political partitioning ride off in the other direction without concern, but what could be more important if we could actually pull it off?
And if we can't, or won't, if we think learning to think better is stupid at best, or a conspiracy to derail our singleminded pursuit of our own education hobbyhorses at worst, methinks we really have no business pretending to be advocates for "education" in any form . . .
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