Editor’s note: This commentary is by Brett Ann Stanciu, who is a writer and sugarmaker in Woodbury. Her first novel, “Hidden View,” was published by Green Writers Press.
[A]s a Woodbury Elementary school board member and an Act 46 study committee member, I recently visited the four other elementary schools in our supervisory union. One of the most striking things I noticed seems overly simple at first: geography matters. All five schools are within a short distance of each other, yet are physically laid out in varying designs, built in different eras, and led by principals unique in background, personality and vision, creating individual physical schools with distinct climates that reflect the varied terrain of the towns. One school is beside a lake, another on a hillside.
Perhaps what most impressed me was that where a child attends a school significantly shapes that child’s education. While I’m profoundly sympathetic to the impetus to equalize educational opportunities for Vermont children, I have to question the wisdom of the current trend to homogenize education across the country as a whole, and particularly in our own state. A child living and educated in a rural town such as Woodbury will inherently have a different educational experience than a child attending a downtown city school. These different experiences need not necessarily translate into a competitive venue.
To be educated, in part, is also to know where you live, and understand your presence in society is acknowledged and valued. In the best of all worlds, education should be an opening of literal and metaphorical doors.
As the granddaughter of Romanian immigrants, I’ve benefitted tremendously from the public school system, and I’m keenly aware that quality education can offer life-altering opportunities. With daughters in both elementary and high schools, I understand the impetus to widen and even out the so-called educational playing field for our kids. But in the well-intended concern to equalize opportunity, let’s not level so profoundly we diminish what’s uniquely valuable in our schools.
Rather than a view of education as a commodity that should be measured out in equivalent amounts, our children would be better served by a more agrarian model that values place – the town, the school, the classroom that holds the child – at the absolute heart of education. Does it matter whether a child’s classroom has not only technology but also windows and growing seedlings? Whether children are offered the opportunity not only to read and write but also to discover and admire the world they inhabit? Does it matter whether a child’s teacher is given the freedom and support to teach with creativity and curiosity? I think inherently these are all givens.
Without question, Vermont’s educational system can be mightily improved, but in our small, primarily rural state, I hope we never lose sight of the importance of place – not an abstract concept, but the tangible world we inhabit. In Woodbury’s small elementary school, built at the beginning of World War I, the door is opened every morning, through all the New England seasons of heat and rain and snow, by the same man, Larry Eldred. One sixth grader, in his graduation speech, added up the number of mornings that door swung open for him, and a mutual good morning was exchanged. Of course, we want our children to read and write fluently, to reason and compute with grace and confidence, but educated children possess more than a collection of facts or series of skills. To be educated, in part, is also to know where you live, and understand your presence in society is acknowledged and valued. In the best of all worlds, education should be an opening of literal and metaphorical doors.
In this Teacher Appreciation Week, it seems apt to reflect that our teachers daily tend our children and our schools. The best of teachers are skilled gardeners, seeking to nourish and draw out the budding potential in their young learners. In my daughter’s small elementary school, teacher appreciation naturally spreads out into all the staff who carry this school. With the current rearranging of the educational system, I hope, foremost, we always remember that a school is about a child in a classroom, and that classroom is within a school. Who opens the door in the school and in the classroom matter to the children. As our own state increasingly struggles with economic and social disintegration, we need that door to remain open for our teachers, too.
If, in fact, as the data (and likely our own experience) disturbingly appears to show, social deterioration and childhood trauma is on the alarming upswing, doesn’t it make sense to put our money – and, perhaps more importantly – our faith and backing in our own hometown teachers, the women and men who are actually in the classroom? The greatest resource our educational system possesses is the non-material asset of our teachers. Let’s not stretch that resource too thinly or ask what cannot be accomplished. As any gardener knows, the fruits of sowing seeds may be years in the blossoming. Gardening encourages patience and perseverance, in an endeavor saturated with hope. These are traits that arise from working the soil of a particular place – traits the best of teachers learn and relearn. Nurturing our teachers will not only yield better, and happier schools, but a more civil society as well.
