Keillor: Education is a moral imperative
By Kathleen Vail
Garrison Keillor brought the news from Lake Wobegon to conference-goers at the Fourth General Session April 1.
Keillor, host of the Prairie Home Companion radio show and a best-selling author, said it was Easter break in Lake Wobegon. They don’t call it spring break, because that “seems to promise too much.”
He talked about the differences between schools now and when he was a child. “Parents trusted schools and asked no questions,” he said. “They told you to do what the teachers said, and if there was a problem, it was your problem.”
Keillor reminisced about his first-grade teacher, who used to ask him to stay behind and read aloud to her after school. “To take a child who is having a hard time reading and make remedial reading seem like you are doing her a favor,” he said, “that is a gift.”
In his day, “people sent their kids to school and asked very few questions about what was going on,” he said. “Parenting wasn’t a verb then.”
Now, the superintendent in Lake Wobegon “is a man whose job is to worry.” And the principal, Mr. Halvorsen, worries about everything, from hugging, to the lunch lady exposing too much cleavage, to “anything that could cause injury.”
Despite such changes, “the principles of public education are the same,” Keillor said. Acknowledging that many schools are struggling now, he reminded his audience that education is a moral imperative, “perhaps the greatest moral obligation we have, and the most important investment a community can make.”
Calling “children are our most precious resource,” he said, “If we lose faith in our children, if we do not give to them at least as good as was given to us, there’s no future for this country.”
Keillor spoke in support of local control of schools. State and national politicians, he said, want to control what goes on in the classroom and beyond. But, he said, when it comes to making painful decisions, “Those decisions should be made by people who can explain them to parents face-to-face.”
The ability of decision-makers to talk to those directly affected breeds “civility in politics,” he said. “It saves us trouble later on.”
Keillor ended by reciting a poem by his teacher at the University of Minnesota, the poet James Wright. “He made you believe that although you came from Anoka, Minn., you could do great things -- you could aspire beyond what anyone would think possible.”
Wright’s poem, “A Blessing,” ends with the lines: “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body/I would break into blossom.”
“Blossoming,” said Keillor, “that is the business we are in.”
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