LETTERS: Jerry Plett
To the Editor:
I'd like to respond to Eric Meyer on the points he made about problems in the public school system. All of them are great points.
What has caused this to happen? We don't have administrators and school boards who fight tooth and nail to maintain independence.
Our leadership is rather seeking to be "progressive," looking to state and federal governments, looking for outside help with subsidies and grants. And as we go farther and farther away from personal responsibility, we have more and more carelessness, more and more disinterest, more and more problems. You can't have responsible education when you don't have control anymore.
We hire professional outsiders to come in who are pumped up with all this knowledge. So they come in here and we let them sucker us into all these modern standards of comformity, dictating how we should think and what our goals should be.
It appears to me that we have sold our souls, our birthright, to bureaucratic strangers who do what they will with us. We are suffering the consequences of that.
Even in the latest issue of the Marion County Record, there are reports of receiving grant money for this and grant money for that. We're constantly asking government for this and for that. We're not being responsible to pay our way. What do we expect?
The intent of government is to take away our rights. This is how they do it. You say, we should go back to basics. Going back to basics is turning away from government welfarism, turning away from asking for something. The basics would be to go on our own, earning our own way, teaching and being independent.
Why is there this drop-out problem in schools? Well, it's part of the same problem that the whole society faces. Students are merely reflecting the fact that they aren't given responsibility. They're not made in charge of their lives. They're not taught to grow up and to function as responsible individuals, to take pride in who they are, to pursue their own career and earn their way.
We have a society which from day one, whether it's the parent, the preacher, the teacher, everybody is dictating a common theme that money is everything, consumerism is everything, self-indulgence is everything.
On the other hand, we don't teach personal responsibility for our deeds. So then, we become very careless, irresponsible, and cynical. Our pride is taken away, for what? To think we can get something for nothing! And this is how we are paying for it on the social side. Statistics prove that.
Leaders continually emphasize the importance and value of educating our children from the cradle on. I, as a taxpayer, as a local patron who had six children go through the school system, have yet to have somebody define for me "quality education." Quality education is not learning to read, learning a career, making a certain amount of money. Quality education is teaching the principle: you have a life to live and you are responsible for making that life worth living.
Responsible education is impossible in the context of how we think about it because it is really mandating or dictating our set of values, our goals, as a certain common interest. Common sense and common law tell us that each one of us as an individual is responsible for the end result of our lives.
That's what we should teach, that's the right we have, not the right to dictate, not the right to consume without being responsible, not the right to be dependent on government.
There's a real good point here. It comes down to the issue of government and politics. That is, we're alarmed by the non-active people in the process. The vast majority of people are not involved. We tend to be very critical of that. The real issue here is the same as in the education system.
If you get involved, you are expected to go with what the administration or other outside influences dictate even if it is contrary to what we as a local community desire. So we're forced to stay away. Anyone who attends meetings and makes any statements opposing the "progressiveness" of these ideas of so-called quality education is said to be against education. So we have no recourse but to not be involved.
One shoe does not fit all. My grandfather was a pastor in our church. He spoke from the heart. My father had no public high school. I considered him a successful farmer and carpenter, very good at figures. My grandsons aren't even in school yet and they have an unbelievable understanding of the computer. Think about it. Great ideas and inventions came from people with no formal education. I believe that all this emphasis on education is just dictating uniformity or conformity, rather than encouraging self-thinking and ideas.
Why can't we consider or respect the mind of the student who drops out, who might have ideas and values of his own that don't necessarily conform to the idea that money is success, as we want to imply. When we consider the great diversity we have as individuals in our talents, abilities, and ideas, who is to say what is considered success for one or the other or the quality of life for one or the other.
You say without education there is no successful future. What is "success?" Is it a measurement or yardstick that someone else establishes because of his ideas and values and that means we all have to conform to that? Is it a standard the government sets? Where is there tolerance for individuals and their own concept of what is valuable?
Does freedom by definition mean, as related in our Constitution, the right of government institutions or individuals to dictate to another the way a person should live or the values he should have? Or is it rather, freedom as an individual to pursue my own ideas, to be my own self, and to live by the dictates of my own conscience?
I think as a society, we are selling ourselves terribly short by letting our government interpret socially our Constitution for the sole purpose of taking away our right of self-determination and to deceive us into thinking that we cannot be responsible for our own lives, our own decisions, our own ideas. So in time, by having that taken away from us, we have become the society that we are today.
Jerry Plett
Lincolnville
