Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Every year I ask my students if they’ve ever heard their parents say, “That’s none of the government’s business.” Most of their hands go up. Then I ask if someone at home has ever said, “The government needs to take care of that.” Most of the same hands go up. That’s because every society lives in the tension between individual rights and collective well-being. Some exist on the edge of chaos and others in the grip of totalitarianism. A few, like ours, manage to strike a tolerable balance between the two, though we’ll never all agree on where that balance is on every issue.
There are two principles on which citizens of a self-governing republic should be able to agree – that sovereign power resides with the people, not with the government, and that the governments instituted at every level by those people, for those people, should be effective.
Sometimes effective government needs to occur on a grand scale. Every state can’t manage its own foreign policy. My little hometown can’t effectively or knowledgeably declare war and conclude peace with foreign powers.
On the other hand, it makes as little sense for a distant federal government, or even a state government, to manage my local school. That’s because no governmental function happens closer to home than educating our children.
It’s out of fashion today, as in other roiled eras in our nation’s past, to admit that most of us, including me, don’t know enough to wisely grapple with the complex issues that confront us as a nation. The fact is we’re not sufficiently knowledgeable about international trade or nuclear proliferation or the federal funds rate to make those decisions ourselves. That’s why we choose representatives who hopefully do know enough. That’s why we’re a republic, not a democracy.
There’s nothing un-American in admitting the limitations of democracy. Politicians like to flatter us. They point their fingers dramatically, raise the pitch of their voices, and tell us how wise we are even as they rely on our ignorance. But you don’t have to look further than the Declaration of Independence to understand that while our government derives its just power from the consent of the governed, the people’s role in government is to create it, change it, and, if necessary, end it. Most of us, however, are no more qualified to be the government than we are to perform our own hip replacements.
Our job is to remain informed, voice our concerns, and exercise our right to cast an intelligent vote for someone we believe to be both competent and trustworthy. The fact that many elected representatives, and candidates, fall short of that standard reflects not only on them, but on us as voters, just as Adolf Hitler’s election in 1933 reflected on the German electorate.
I’m not advocating micromanagement. I don’t want somebody’s mother telling me how to teach adverbs any more than I’d tell my physician how to replace my hip. I do, however, reserve the right to decide whether I want it replaced.
The bigger the stage and the farther from home, the more we’re obliged to rely on the expertise of trusted representatives. As government draws closer to home, however, we’re able to know more about the issues and the players and, therefore, can more directly govern ourselves. Our capacity to directly and constructively participate in government is inversely proportional to the distance of that government from our homes.
It’s ironic in this age of resurgent populism that the loudest voices exalting the power of the people commonly favor moving government ever farther from those people.
Schools offer the clearest example of this usurpation. Under the banner of “consolidation,” wrapped in fallacious appeals to “equity,” and promising economies that almost never materialize, local school boards and communities are financially induced and outright compelled by statute to surrender control over this most local aspect of government.
I’m not advocating micromanagement. I don’t want somebody’s mother telling me how to teach adverbs any more than I’d tell my physician how to replace my hip. I do, however, reserve the right to decide whether I want it replaced. That’s because it belongs to me. In the same way, my students belong to their parents, and the school where I teach belongs to its community.
Yes, it’s ordinarily better if board members leave the day-to-day operation of their community’s schools to the teachers and administrators they’ve hired to run them. But when teachers and administrators forget that they’re trustees accountable to citizens and parents, when district officials begin to presume that their authority exceeds the power of the citizen board for whom they work, we’ve crossed the line from self-government to tyrannical government.
This tyranny by officials is enhanced by initiatives to merge and absorb local school boards into consolidated districts whose administrative officials are accountable in theory to a collection of communities and therefore in practice to no community in particular. Communities effectively lose their power to approve their schools’ curriculum, adopt their schools’ policies, establish their academic and discipline standards, and hire and fire their teachers and principal.
Vesting authority in the hands of a superintendent who works for a board comprising many towns strips every town of its power to govern its own schools.
A school’s connection to its community, apart from contributing to its charm and character, is central to its effectiveness. That’s because its teachers and principal, serving under the direction of its community school board, know their students best. The intrusions of distant central office, state and federal officials into what we teach, how we teach it, and how we deal with the students we know and they don’t know is rarely helpful.
Arguments contending that schools need that expertise from above must reckon with officials’ historic penchant for flitting from initiative to initiative, from one new big thing to the next. In this age of near-constant “reform,” most of the worst education ideas and classroom follies have been imposed from above.
Conducting foreign policy requires that local communities yield their authority and discretion to a more distant government. Educating children, however, doesn’t happen in distant capitals. It happens in a community’s classrooms, within sight of that community, to that community’s children.
It needs by right to remain within that community’s control.
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