Essays From West of 98: The Meaning of Education

Education should be about more than merely creating workers for The Economy

I’m writing this after the first day of school at Stamford ISD. It is also the first day (or near to it) for many other communities in my readership. I have previously written that the first day of school is a New Year’s Day of sorts in a community. For our family, it is a New Year of larger proportions, because our oldest daughter just started kindergarten.

We cannot separate the topic of improving rural communities from the topic of education within those communities. Public education has been a political flashpoint in the last few years, both in Texas and elsewhere. I rarely engage with that discourse, because most of it nauseates me and little of it actually concerns the improvement of education in rural communities.

Several years ago, I wrote about a semi-viral conversation on Twitter in which a rural business owner lamented that few graduating seniors planned to stay in his local community. This person treated it as a grievance: the local taxpayers had paid for the education and the inconsiderate youths didn’t care enough to stick around and thank their elders for the gift of their education. I took a different approach to that topic. I asked whether local businesses and community leaders had created job opportunities, promoted the type of skills that would keep those students, or given them any reason at all to stick around or return one day.

I turn to our frequent friend Wendell Berry. To no one’s surprise, Wendell has written many times on the topic of education. His perspective never fits within any “Republican” or “Democrat” notions of the education question. In an essay entitled “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” Berry writes:

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept 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 cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”

Berry has often referred to the “industrial education” model, which churns out masses of new workers for The Economy without care or concern for the places in which those workers originate. It’s a core part of the emptying of rural America after World War II. We built an economic system that couldn’t care less about the roots in place and community. To supplement it, we built an education system to serve that economic system. As a result, workers (which is to say “people”) gather en masse in the places that the economic system has determined to be winners of The Economy. Then our politicians wonder why the remaining places have declined.

I am thankful that in places like Stamford, we have school teachers, administrators, and staff who care about their place. Many of them grew up in Stamford, have family roots here, or have chosen this as the place to raise their own family. That matters to the future of a place. I am glad that our daughters will be educated by those people. I do not think that rural public education could survive without folks like them.

As community leaders, we should be ever mindful that the larger education forces are not designed to serve our communities. State and federal policymakers and the special interests who back them are rarely interested in places like Stamford. To the extent our schools are the collateral damage of their larger goals, them’s the breaks. They are certainly not interested in enabling the youth of Stamford to “live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.”

It is incumbent on the local community to ensure that we do just that, through every facet of education—at school, at home, at our cultural institutions, and in the community. By doing that, and by uplifting our local educators who truly care about those notions, we can properly educate the next generation in the important manner that Berry describes. We can raise something more than a mass of new workers for The Economy. We can strengthen the tie between education and place. In doing so, we can build a community that is worthwhile for an educated youth to stay or return.

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.