Ryan Edel
February 6, 2010
Earlier today, my mom called me with a favor to ask. My Aunt Susie, she said, was concerned that the public school near her home would be closed. I was told that plans to convert the school to a magnet program were being considered, but would probably be voted down. And this news disappoints me. It made me think of my Uncle Bob – Bob Briggs, the dentist who served Winona for many years. And when I think of Uncle Bob, I think of him the way my mom always described him. He was the “self-made man,” the dentist who worked hard to support the hobbies he always enjoyed – flying, hunting, travel abroad. Yet Uncle Bob was just like any of us – optimistic and hopeful, but still very grounded in the realities of life. He focused on the important things – his family, kindness to others, and the cheerful decency which endeared him to all who knew him. It was very hard to see him go – harder still to attend his funeral and then finally realize that he wasn’t coming back. And when I attended his funeral last February, I was struck by just how many people came to pay their respects. He had lived his life to the fullest – in death, he filled the church with the love those who would miss him.
This man so loved by others grew up on small farm in central Iowa. Where he grew up, no one had enough money. Decades after the fact, Mom still bragged about the year Grandma and Grandpa earned an extra dollar a bushel on soybeans – “Christmas that year was a good one,” she liked to tell us. And I know for a fact that no one in the family attended private school. When my Uncle Bob was growing up, the only education available to him came from a county bus taking him to the public school.
His story is hardly unique. There is a long tradition of public education in the United States. As early as 1635, the city of Boston set aside public funds to found the Latin School, the first public school in America. Three of our Founding Fathers – Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock – attended the Latin School as children. Franklin, the fifteenth of seventeen children, only attended the Latin School for two years before his father pulled him out of school. The elder Franklin saw little promise in his youngest son’s studies – he put Benjamin to work in his shop as a candle maker at age ten. At twelve, Benjamin became an apprentice at his half-brother’s print shop. Yet his brief experience in the Latin School fostered Franklin’s lifelong desire for learning. The Latin School taught him to read – a critical skill for a man who was to become one of the most important writers, inventors, and diplomats in American history.
Had his brief education not been publicly provided, it is unlikely that Benjamin Franklin would have attended school at all. Yet today, at a time when America most needs students who are educated to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, we debate the value of public education. Many insist that private schools are, by definition, superior. Others feel that public education is a lost cause, a kind of sinkhole for monies wasted on students who will never succeed. Some even believe that the success stories of public education – the Uncle Bobs and Benjamin Franklins – are oddities, the kind of people who would succeed even without formal education. But I know otherwise. I can tell you from personal experience that public education, for many, provides the only road to success.
Growing up, I had the good fortune to attend Hawthorne Scholastic Academy, an elementary magnet program in the Chicago Public Schools. And I do not pretend that Hawthorne was ordinary school – at Hawthorne, our teachers went the extra mile for us. There was Ms. Sullivan, who taught us to read literature and write children’s books. Ms. Nieker dedicated time in the mornings to prepare me and other students for the Math Olympiads. Ms. Rodabaugh taught us to write persuasive essays. I credit Hawthorne – a small public school on the north side of Chicago – with starting me on the road to academic scholarship. Later, Lincoln Park High School – also part of the Chicago Public Schools, once a neighborhood school for the Cabrini Green Housing Projects – placed me on a path to the Illinois State Science Fair, a National Merit Scholarship, and later a full-tuition scholarship to Case Western Reserve University.
Now I cannot say that these achievements came easily. I spent many hours writing and studying. And I was not alone in achievement – my friend Shelley was the Illinois State Scholar for 1998. I boarded the bus for the State Science Fair with Amy, Sameer, David, Emily, and several others from Lincoln Park. But I won’t lie – we were the lucky ones. We were students in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, a program used by 2,800 schools across 138 countries. The year I graduated – 1998 – Lincoln Park High School was ranked 12th in the world among IB programs. We had fifty-three students attending a public program in the Chicago Public Schools, and we ranked 12th in the world.
I wish I could say this was entirely the result of student initiative. It wasn’t. We succeeded because of the attention and encouragement provided by our teachers – each one a public educator, certified by the State of Illinois. We succeeded only because our teachers succeeded in every sense of the word.
I believe that every American child deserves the attention that I received as a student. For the majority of students, such opportunities are only available through public education. As my mom began telling me in middle school, “you’ll need scholarships if you want to go to a good school.” And the good school she referred to was college – there was no money for private school before then. Beginning in high school, Mom promised enough money for in-state tuition at the University of Illinois. “Anything more expensive than that,” she told me, “you’ll need to earn yourself.”
Unfortunately, young children do not have the advantages of college freshmen. The benefits of on-campus employment and National Merit Scholarships simply don’t exist for students entering kindergarten. But it’s kindergarten where our children learn to read. It’s elementary school where they learn their multiplication tables, middle school where they learn the meaning of literature, and high school where they begin to understand the meaning of history, freedom, and the American Way of Life. And if we prevent our children from learning all that they can learn – if we fail to provide the means for every child to receive the education that he or she deserves – then we have failed more than just the future. We will have failed the promise that is America, the belief that every hardworking citizen will be allowed to reach his or her fullest potential.
Ryan Edel is currently a graduate student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he served five years in the U.S. Army as an Arabic linguist, which included three years in the 82nd Airborne Division and a ten month deployment to Afghanistan.
