Considering K-12 Education as a Necessity for the Human Family

Some commentators on K-12 education say that before we can have an effective public education system, we must have better functioning families. Many specify that every family must have a present and participatory mother and father. But the reality is, if we wait to overhaul K-12 education until all families function according to the prescriptions of these commentators, we might as well wait until Sisyphus gets that pesky boulder up the eternally daunting hill.

If all families do not function according to our ideals, then we must consider every family our own. Every family is a part of the human family, so if any family needs assistance, it is our obligation as human beings to render the necessary help. This means that every child in every family belongs to each one of us and deserves any opportunity for a happy life that we would wish for and work toward in behalf of the children in the natal and conjugal families over which we preside. We should think this way, and act accordingly, because it is the right thing to do. Striving for the common good is central to the ethos of each of the world’s great religions, with human beings conceptualized as brothers and sisters, children of a loving God; and working in the best interests of all people is also germane to humanist morality. Hence, if any of us takes seriously that religion or philosophy that we are likely to hold central to the way we move and act in the world, we will at all times consider our responsibility to all of our brothers and sisters in the human family.

I work seven days a week with families and their children in North Minneapolis. I arrive at their homes, engage them in conversation, find out the nature of their most recent challenges, and am able to consider all of what I hear in the context of an ongoing relationship. For I have drawn so close to the students and families associated with the New Salem Educational Initiative that I have become essentially another family member. These wonderful people, all of them economically poor, many residing in household units giving evidence of familial dysfunction, nevertheless continue to strive for the betterment of those whom they love with a ferocity that matches the parental love of those so quick to cast judgment upon them.

Less than perfect families and children facing life challenges truly daunting for their young years are human realities. These conditions define the circumstances that many students bring to school with them. This represents a challenge that we have a responsibility to face, not to use as an excuse for the glaring deficiencies of our system of public K-12 education. Political conservatives most often cite one-parent households and unorthodox familial structures as excuses for our failure properly to educate all of our children. But political liberals also often sound a similar note, echoing the chant of the education establishment that public education inherits problems born of family and community that must be solved by family and community.

But all of us are part of the human family and therefore members of the same community. As an educator, I consider it my most important duty to educate those who come from the most challenged households. The program that I run features academic sessions held during non-school hours, during late afternoons and evenings and on weekends. Much of what I do could be extrapolated and taken as a model by the Minneapolis Public Schools. I provide transportation to all of my students to each and every session, virtually assuring near-perfect attendance, interacting as I do with the families at the time of pickup and return: Minneapolis public school officials could retrain and reassign underworked bureaucrats to serve as family liaisons who know the life circumstances of each of the most challenged families in the school district. In the academic sessions that I run, I focus like a laser on math, reading, and engaging materials from across the liberal arts; I am no-nonsense about the use of our time for educational purposes, while at the same time bantering relentlessly in a way that captures the attention and brings smiles to those human treasures under my tutelage: Minneapolis Public Schools personnel should take notes on the matters of a rich math, reading, and liberal arts curriculum; and on matters of pedagogy.

If family outreach is strong, if curriculum is rich, and if teaching is proficient, all children in the K-12 public schools can be properly educated. We owe such an education to all students, because equal opportunity is central to a democracy. And we must love all children as our own, because they are ours in the family surnamed Humanity.