Article #3 >>>>> Don’t Know Much About Nothin’ at All

One winter evening I sat peering into the blaze of my wood-burning stove, the route of my ruminations ultimately pointing me topically toward the knowledge-poverty endemic to the United States, and to the damage inflicted by the education establishment on our nation’s youth.


At this mental juncture, I was thinking specifically of a question that a candidate for superintendent, Jinger Gustafson, had asked members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education:


Given her turn near the end of her interview to ask a question of board members, Ms. Gustafson asked,


“What keeps you up at night?”


 Board members seemed nonplused. Only two mustered some sort of answer.


Thinking about the question in the context of knowledge-poverty, I found myself singing alternative lyrics to the Sam Cooke classic, [What a] Wonderful World, penned by the soul master with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert. My version, rendered as a lament from a student of the Minneapolis Public Schools, went as follows:


Don't know much about history,
don't know much geography,
don't know much about no science book,
don't know much about the French I took.

Don't know much about no Rise and Fall;
don't know much about nothin' at all---


You ain't put much in our heads,
so all we got to do is fall into bed,
gettin' pregnant in our early years,
you left us with so many haunting fears---


So just when the sun of our youth had risen,
we hit the streets, and we were off to prison.    
That must make you feel awf’ly good,
not having educated us as you should---

just sittin' there watchin' us Rise and Fall,
we don't know how you sleep at all---


You ain't put much in our heads,
so all we got to do is fall into bed,
gettin' pregnant in our early years,
you left us with so many haunting fears---


So just when the sun of our youth had risen,
we hit the streets and were off to prison.

That must make you feel awf’ly good,
not having educated us as you should.
just sittin' and watchin' us Rise and Fall,
we don't know how you sleep at all---


We don't know how you sleep at all.




But there is a better way forward, found in our sacred responsibility to provide an education of substance to our youth, our lost human treasures whom we must seek and find and embrace, and to whom we must give the knowledge for which they have been waiting a very long time.