Community College

(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, 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, 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.)