"Soldier, ask not -
now, or ever,
Where to war your
banners go.."
from the novel Soldier,
Ask Not
by Gordon Dickson
We replied to Mr. Diuguid:
We agree the District is short let's say $60 million and that it seems
unlikely financial cavalry will ride to rescue. What solar buys the District
and its teachers and students is time. Some jobs for makers and installers
of panels and batteries cannot be all bad either. Were we asked, we'd say
Kansas City needed to go the other way: increase the number of teachers
and increase the time in class.
Symbolically, that would mean two more flags and two more flagpoles at
Northeast: one for the state flag and one for a city flag. For millenia,
military flags have meant "Here we are. Come and try to take our flags from
us." We'd interpret additional flags to mean students felt their land and
their school and their future were worth fighting for.
The only purpose of a retreat is to live to fight another day - otherwise, one
might as well surrender. If the schools get closed and the teachers fired
what happens in 2011? Failure to clearly state that is striking your colors.
So here's an experiment: ask the principals at Northeast and Westport and
schools of your choice to announce WHY daily flag raisings will occur and
then count who attends.
The good news for children and parents and teachers of Kansas City is that no one needs to travel
thousands of miles to fight a war. The war has come to you. No doubt there are better times to fight,
but that is no longer a choice. The battle is here and now. But you are not alone. And the combat is not
mortal: the sun will still rise in the east and shine on the solar panels each morning if an individual
student gets a 610 instead of a 620 on some SAT test. In the greater scheme of things it does not
matter if there is only one flag; it is too small a flag; there is no flagpole; or no one shows up to raise
the flag in the morning. Still, it would be a very powerful message to replace Northeast's photo with
one showing the flag and lots of students. For that matter, post a web page with a list of names of who
showed up - that way, some fine day years from now someone can show his or her grandchildren he or
she believed their futures were worth fighting for. To students we would say: Stay in school. Go to
class. Study. Graduate. Live a good, long life. But most of all, REMEMBER, so that your children and
your children's children don't go through this again.
We noticed that Mr. Diuguid mentioned that Northeast is 95 years old and Westport is over 100. We
would assert that a case can be made that the older some structure is, the MORE value it can have.
Virtually all of the great Gothic cathedrals are still working churches. To be sure, the Great Pyramid
at Giza failed as a tomb. But no one is advocating tearing it down.
By the way, in the spirit of full disclosure, we observe a fair amount of mathematical chaos in our
models if a school board closes a school but students continue to attend it. It would seem reasonable
that newly unemployed teachers, having little better to do, might join them. Transferred teachers
might well be looking at empty classrooms, so they should likely be ethically obliged to teach where
the students are. We're not very impressed with school closings, teacher firing or strikes for that
matter. What is missed in all that is that time is precious and is that families are both consumers and
products of the educational system.