Tom Finneran: America’s Big Mistake
Friday, June 20, 2014
More and more frequently in more and more communities, America’s parents are receiving versions of the above note. What a shame. And what a mistake. It’s another example of America heading in the wrong direction…
Now before we go beating up the Mayberry School Committee for acting like a collection agency, let’s establish a few things. First, I have no doubt that the Committee cherishes the town’s traditions, having probably attended the very same schools and participated in the same programs for which they now send out dunning notices. And I have little doubt that way back then, their participation did not depend upon a parent’s check to cover the costs. Once upon a time in America, those after-school clubs and activities were part and parcel of America’s educational efforts. Finally, I have no doubt that America’s colleges and universities, and, as importantly, America’s employers, placed a very high value on extra-curricular activities. In fact they still do. As they should…
After all, it’s an acknowledgement that academic achievement is more challenging and therefore more impressive when a student’s time is crimped by the demands of after-school programs. Whether it’s the football team, drama club, school newspaper, band, or debate team matters not. What matters is the demonstration of the self-discipline needed to do multiple things well. Let’s call it an early-life version of multi-tasking.
So where did we go wrong? When did it become standard practice to send Mr. and Mrs. Jones a bill for Johnny making the baseball team and Amanda joining the drama club? Why did older-generation Americans begin to resent the cost of educating the next generation and resist the annual requests for school funding? In some cities and towns the inter-generational tension is palpable and it plays out in a bitter form of politics.
I suspect that we are witnesses to a classic good news/ bad news story. It happens often you know. Something that could once only be dreamed about as science fiction becomes an everyday norm, bringing with it unanticipated side effects. At the turn of the last century, life expectancies were shockingly low. In this new century, life expectancies are considerably higher. Good news, right? Statistics suggest that the fastest-growing cohort of Americans is that group 85 years of age and higher! Americans are living longer, healthier, more active lives than ever before. It’s an amazing success story involving economics, energy, public sanitation, vaccines, and nutrition. Yet the downsides emerge.
Huge stress on Social Security. Huge stress on Medicare. Inadequate private savings to cover longer and longer life spans, causing terrible economic anxieties among the nation’s older citizens and worries about being able to afford to stay in their homes. It’s little wonder that they resist those annual requests for more funding. They fear being made homeless.
Need another example? All those advances in medicine that science has brought us are meaningless unless applied to improve the human condition. So when there’s a breakthrough in diagnoses, or medicines, or alternative treatments, there is often another bulge in costs that had never previously existed. Think of special education and the thousands of American kids who used to be consigned to bleak educational and economic lives because no one understood their particular illness. Today those kids have a fighting chance to break out of the handcuffs of fate. That’s a good thing for them and for us. But it’s also an expensive thing…
Back to Johnny and Amanda and their beleaguered parents, being asked to pony up big dollars for the “privilege” of some extra-curricular activities… consider too that many young parents in many towns simply don’t have several hundred “school activity” dollars lying around and available every school quarter. The kids of those parents are totally foreclosed from an array of wholesome after-school activities. Finally, back to the Mayberry School Committee, most likely choosing a classic political compromise between the town’s senior citizens on fixed incomes and the families of school-age children by sending out those bills for after-school activities… they are trapped in the land of lousy choices, a land that frustrates and fatigues so many public officials. Perhaps our candidates for Governor might give some thought to this challenge before embracing some ultra-fashionable new cause. How about standing up and speaking up for our kids? Call it bold for baseball, sure for Shakespeare.
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