This column came to my attention from Ann Marie Bannfield who as become one of the most knowledgeable and articulate defenders of the need for Educational Freedom, for local control, and an ardent foe of lowered educational/academic standards that have swept our country. Thus, when she emailed out a link to this Op-Ed, I read it. After doing so, it became clear that this is one of the best pieces I have read that simply and plainly call out the real bullies in the educational field. No, not other students but the adults on the other side of the desk in the form of the teachers unions.
The political bullying of NH school children continues BY RICHARD EVANS
I despise bullies.
One of the most profound impressions ever made on me was when, as a young man in the 1980s, I travelled along the border between China and Hong Kong. I vividly remember watching the people on the Chinese side laboring in the rice fields, literally in the shadow of the gun towers which sprouted from the barbed wire at frequent intervals. At the end of the day, my wife and I crossed back to the other side of the wire beyond which lay freedom and prosperity.
For our Chinese guide and the folks in the fields, however, that was a forbidden land. How unimaginably galling it must have been for them to peer through that barrier every day of their lives, and see Nirvana so close and yet so unattainable.
Years later I realized that the most telling feature of any wall is the posture of the guards. The Chinese guards on the border, like their counterparts who once manned the equally dismal Berlin Wall, were not defending their fellow citizens against outside attack. They were facing inwards, preventing escape. Arch bullies, one and all.
Not all walls are physical structures. The wall that has been erected around our public schools is purely economic, yet it traps those it surrounds equally as effectively as any barbed wire. Escape is theoretically feasible, but it comes with a price tag that is beyond the means of most families. To leave is to forgo, for some completely unfathomable reason, all access to a share of the substantial funding that society allocates to education. All of the money must stay behind.
