Historical Tidbits
by DONN BROOKS
It was the Treaty of Versailles that brought on World War II, and I am afraid we are headed down that same road once again. Pray with me that I am wrong.
We who write columns ought not do so until we have something to say. Then, voila, it should come pouring from a fertile ability to shape thoughts and mold them into cogent paragraphs that any fool can understand, thus shaping mentality for all who read.
What happens, then, when a writer is not sure what he wants to say, but still feels something is left unsaid. Why is it up to me to articulate a vague uneasiness when the rest of society is so full of itself?
I am confounded if I know the answer to that riddle.
I do not just speak of one issue, you understand. I speak of several and the death of Osama bin Laden heads the list. Everyday capital punishment is never far from my thought process. What will we do with our messy approach to public education?
Frankly, it just seems to me that the world, insofar as the United States is concerned, is snake-bit. Nothing seems to be going right. Although everybody gripes and fusses, me worse than anybody, my solutions do not resonate with anybody. Can I be that far off base? Common logic would appear so.
Let’s take the case of Saddam Hussein and later Osama bin Laden. Me, I would prefer to have captured them alive and imprison them in the lap of luxury. There is ample precedent for that, witness Sam Houston versus Santa Anna during the Texas Revolution and MacArthur/Truman versus Hirohito at the end of World War II. Lincoln and Grant versus Davis and Lee provide the same sort of precedent as we closed out the Civil War. But today we seek revenge, no matter the consequences. And I feel very lonely in suggesting that revenge offers unintended consequences.
We may see the toppling of power in the mid-East, but we admit that we do not know what is going to take its place. First, we should be saying, as the physician, “Do no harm.” Instead we worship at the altar of revenge, clueless about what regime may replace Mubarek or Khadafi. I stand alone. Revenge is winning the day and I fear it will be a hollow victory. You will remember that the Treaty of Versailles exacted revenge from Germany in the form of reparations and that act brought on a Great Depression that resulted in World War II.
And you will recall from your history that the United States had learned its lesson by the end of World War II and came up with the Marshall Plan, a highly successful protocol that has a significant Kyle connection.
I play a lonely game of solitaire in the matter of the death penalty. I have very little sympathy for those who are put to death, although the torture of the hours and days prior to the execution sum up, in my view, as cruel and unusual punishment per the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of 1789. The perpetrators of these dastardly deeds may not fit legal descriptions of insane, but they were not thinking rationally at the time of the events. The sum of the executions in the history of the nation did not cause the offender to stop and say, “I better not do this, because, after all, I could be executed for it.” Still, we spend ghastly sums of money prosecuting these misfits, knowing all the time that it is cheaper to keep them imprisoned for life. We offer the paltry excuse, “But they might escape.” Death row inmates have been paroled, but I cannot recall the escape of any. Prison escapes are rare, although to be sure they are not rare enough.
For public education I just do not know what to say. The state comes along in 1984 and puts us on an accountability footing in the public schools. Supposedly. What they did was put schools in competition with one another. They made the real estate industry major players, because exemplary schools attract high dollar real estate better than acceptable scholarly venues. Thus we put terrible pressure on principals to deliver and, while we are at it we are not above doing just a little gerrymandering of attendance zones. Push me and I will cite circumstances. I worked for three great principals and there were always times when they called me in and apologized, but put a difficult student in my class because they thought he/she would do better there. Now, of course, I would protest, because this is the sort of student that makes teachers look bad when it comes time for the standardized tests. But, then, I took it as a compliment, and it nearly always worked out.
Now, principals ask for all sorts of instructional help because they cannot be expert in all fields of academia and they need help in order to bolster their test scores. Thus, we have the bloat that the legislature is trying to correct, insouciant to the fact that it was the legislature that started the process in the first place.
Individual attention for most of my teaching career was believed to be the order of the day, the solution for all the problems besieging our youth. Individual attention requires lots of staff, and we poured the dollars at the staff. We believed we could buy success through enlarging of staff. School superintendents saw their salaries increase exponentially, the principal task being to raise test scores. If that superintendent proved unsuccessful, he would be replaced by another school head, always at an increase of salary.
There is no more correlation between teaching salaries and those of superintendents than there is between polar bear claws and fire ant brains.
And education, like the death penalty and mid-East leadership poses, for me, no solutions. Not so most of our population. They are as sure of these things as they are of the law of gravity. And, I am lonely today, because these certainties have evaded me.
Of this I am sure: Cocksureness has never resulted in the permanent solution of one national problem. So, if our sureness of ourselves results in bringing these thorny topics to successful and permanent solution, we can at least conclude that it is an historic moment.
Optimists believe we have the formula for improving society. I fail to believe that. I believe that we are selling our souls to short term gains for long term losses. I believe that we have failed to put sound public practice above personality. I am afraid that party success has come to trump statesmanship. I fear that our cocksureness is preventing sober and sincere debate on important issues. I think it was this cocksureness that led the allies to impose such a horrible peace on the Axis Powers at the end of World War I.
I wish it were otherwise.
That Kyle connection? The United States used the Marshall Plan to get Europe back on its feet following World War II. It proved highly successful. It was written by a certain Will Clayton, the economic adviser to President Harry S. Truman. The good Mr. Clayton was the great-grandfather of her Honor, Mayor Lucy Johnson of Kyle.
