Essays From West of 98: The Meaning of Education Part 2, The Quality of a Local School

Continuing an inquiry into why schools exist in the first place

Happy New Year!

This week kicks off the school year in Stamford. For our community and so many others like it, this is the true “new year.” Children, teachers, and staff members start a fresh season. New faces appear in the classrooms, hallways, and school buses. Some old faces have moved on to their next steps in life. Some children have started a new school journey that will last for over a decade. Others have completed their school journey forever.

A year ago, I penned an essay to kick off the school year entitled “The Meaning of Education.” It turned out to be one of my more widely-read essays in this West of 98 project. In that essay, I used one of Wendell Berry’s most famous lines about the purpose of education:

“Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.”

This is a powerful statement. It emphasizes both the hopeful ideal and the flawed reality of education in America as a whole. Our rural schools are handed an even more difficult task. The levers of power and funding are controlled at far-away political centers by politicians with their own hobby horses and schemes. They constantly war with one another, stepping all over us even as they forget that our schools have very real challenges of their own.

Read this month’s edition of The Prairie Panicle here. Have you checked out the West of 9/8 podcast? Each essay is published on all podcasting apps and longer standalone podcast episodes are coming soon! If you are inclined, would you rate and review the podcast? Every online review of my podcast or share of my writings helps me reach new readers and listeners. As always, thanks for reading!

With the reality of that landscape, it has been on my mind over the preceding twelve months how a community can best improve its local education landscape and support those whom we elect and appoint to govern our local schools. Those schools do not exist in a vacuum separate from the rest of our local government and the rest of the community. Even if we wanted our school to be siloed off from everything else (and we shouldn’t want that), our communities are simply too small. A person can live in a large city and never once interact with the school system. That is simply not the case in a rural place like my own. City leaders have family members who are employed by the school, who attend the school, or who are elected to the school board. If city leaders own a business, they probably support school activities whether they have any children attending the school or not. A school’s extracurricular activities are our community’s front porch. Outsiders may have never set foot in our city limits but still know us by the accomplishments of our students.¹ Families can and do move to towns where a school is thriving and provides opportunities for children like their own. When the school is struggling or full of dysfunction, the job of revitalizing the community at large becomes that much more difficult. I’d assert that a rural community will not prosper over the long term without a quality school.

But by what standard do we judge the “quality” of a school? Our state and federal politicians and bureaucrats have plenty of metrics. They wield them like a cudgel to allocate and withhold funding and threaten local schools to stay in line with their mandated ideals of the moment. Politicians parade around their metrics in electoral circuses and legislative sessions centered around education REE-FORM with a shamelessness that has me waiting on someone to eventually break out a broom as a campaign prop like the ridiculous gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes in the cinematic classic “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

These metrics are based on “reasonable” sounding data like standardized test scores, graduation rates, college readiness, and job placement, among other things. Reasonable they may be, but who (or what) do they benefit? Do these metrics help build an educational system that is integral to a local community, raising children to be responsible citizens of their local place? Or do they simply help train an army of workers to serve The Economy?

In the 1960s, Wendell Berry critiqued the purpose of American schools in his uniquely provocative manner. He wrote that schools resembled a combination of “babysitting, job training, and incarceration.”² Yikes! Like many of Berry’s critiques, he is not wrong, uncomfortable as it may read. To be clear, this is a criticism of a flawed system with misbegotten purposes, not of local teachers. When Berry describes a good teacher, it is some of his most beautiful writing:

“Like a good farmer, a good teacher is the trustee of a vital and delicate organism: the life of a mind in his community. The standard of his discipline is his community’s health and intelligence and coherence and endurance. This is a high calling, deserving of a life’s work.”³

Berry rightly envisions education as part of a community’s ecology, concerned with the care and cultivation of a local place. Local people would educate their children with local values to become responsible members of the local place. Sure, those children have free will to move on to a new place, but the school would not manufacture their exit. Yet, our modern society does exactly that. A society that views rural places as archaic trains rural youth in a sanitized, industrial manner to leave those archaic places as soon as possible and never look back. It is incumbent on local people—both inside and outside the school—to encourage our children to grow in a manner that does not alienate them from their place.

I distinctly remember a moment in junior high when I was asked to write down some career goals. My stated plans involved building a life and career in Stamford. This was reviewed by a particular administrator who was not from here, only worked here a short time, and thankfully moved on shortly thereafter. He lampooned my goals in a private conversation, informing me that I could “do better” than that. Even as a teenager, I thought he was full of it and promptly dismissed his advice on that topic and all other topics. I have just enough of my grandfather’s irascible spitefulness in my DNA that I wanted to prove otherwise to that guy and a few others along my journey (mostly at the post-secondary level) who doubted my goals.

To be clear, I had many people in my path in the Stamford school system who were NOT like that guy. Many of those people are still my friends in adulthood. They encouraged me to follow my dreams, whatever those dreams might be. Yet, I know that my experience is not unique. I cannot help but wonder how many other rural children devalued their local place when they were told they could “do better.” This is why it matters for a community’s people to have passion for their place and to impart that on the children of the place as they grow older.

What is the meaning of local education, then? And by extension, what is the purpose of our local community at large? Do our communities exist for their own sake, as a place for people to love one another, love God’s creation, and build relationships and prosperous lives together? Or do our communities merely exist as an exploited colony, enriching a distant land by shipping away our wealth, natural resources, and young people?

As a new school year dawns, may we focus on the purpose of our place and see our local schools as an integral to the local ecosystem of life. May our communities give the support, encouragement, and protection to our schools, so that our teachers can nurture our young minds in the powerful calling that is their work.

---

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

---

1. It’s funny. There are towns all across Texas that I have not visited, but I have some sort of random affinity for them because I remember their high school football teams doing extraordinarily well in the 1990s, when I first started poring over the Class 2A playoff brackets like they held the secret map to find Coronado’s lost treasure.

2. This comes from Berry’s early-career attempt to tackle the question of racism in “The Hidden Wound.” Berry himself thought he left the subject incomplete, and that may be the case, but this short book is one of his best and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

3. This quote comes from a Berry essay collection entitled “What are People For?”, in particular the essay entitled “Wallace Stegner and the Great Community.”