In Mark Twain’s wonderful book, Joan of Arc, he describes a scene in which Joan, having driven the English out of France, is asked by the newly crowned French king to name anything she wants as a reward.
She says that she doesn’t want anything for herself, but she knows that the people of her village are hard-pressed to pay their taxes and wishes that they didn’t have to. The king calls in the royal tax collector and tells him to excuse her village from taxation forever.
Fast forward several hundred years. Joan is now everywhere in France. There are buildings and streets named after her. She appears on stamps. She is honored in a hundred different ways. But the people who live in her village are paying taxes again.
The one thing she asked for, she didn’t get. Instead, she got a bunch of things she didn’t ask for.
I often think about Joan when I look at what’s happened in our public schools. The one thing that the state supreme court said that the state is supposed to provide is ‘the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.’
Can you participate intelligently in those systems if you can’t read, write, understand statistics, follow and construct a logical argument, and recognize a specious one? No, you can’t. Those things are necessary.
Can you participate intelligently in those systems if you can’t speak a foreign language, play a sport or a musical instrument, calculate a derivative, weld two pieces of metal together, or set up a spreadsheet? Yes, you can. Those things — while interesting and important for some people to know — are not necessary.
But our schools are utterly failing to provide what is necessary (as evidenced by the fact that only 40% of New Hampshire students are proficient in English and mathematics) while falling all over themselves (and walking all over taxpayers) to provide what is not necessary.
Like Joan, the court asked for one thing, which it didn’t get: a solid grounding for students in literacy and logical thought. Instead, it got a bunch of things — including transportation, therapy, meals, daycare, support for hobbies, job training — that it didn’t ask for.
Joan, for her trouble, was burned at the stake for driving the English out of the kingdom of France. One wonders what fate awaits those of us who are trying to drive the Entitled out of the fiefdom of School Funding.
