The Transmission Of Civilization

Will Durant, the American writer, historian, and philosopher, looked at history not as a series of great events but as an incremental process driven by the demands of the human condition. He understood that classrooms, more than castles and capitols, are the prime locus of power for a society. “Education,” he wrote, “is the transmission of civilization.”

It is hard to see that power as we watch tiny kindergartners climb onto school buses for their first day of school, as they will on Tuesday next week. Each year they look so small and vulnerable as they emerge in a surge of courage from behind mother’s pant legs to get on the bus to take up the adventure of schooling. And each year they find reassurance on the other end of that bus ride, as school administrators and teachers greet them, literally bowing down to their need for a gentle landing at the first stop of their long journey as students. From such fragile beginnings, great things can grow, but only if we as a community recognize it for the great enterprise it is.

Newtown will have spent more than $52 million on the 400 or so kindergarteners starting school next week by the time they emerge from our school system with diplomas in 2020. And we can expect to spend that much and more on next year’s kindergarteners, and the next year’s, and the next. This business of education is a tremendous expense that weighs down the rest of a community’s financial and political apparatus, producing cracks and fault lines in our resolve to carry out our obligations to the next generation and ultimately to civilization. It takes a lot of haggling, as we have seen in recent years, as voters reject budget proposals repeatedly while budgetmakers cut, recalculate, and tweak in response. Yet, somehow we come up with the money to pay for it all.

The obligation, however, is not entirely settled with money. As we see in that scene of first-day kindergarteners, which never fails to open our hearts and hold our interest, the process of education is at its core a compact of trust between parents and educators. It requires each to support the other and both to support and inspire the courage of children to take on a long line of new challenges after that first high step onto the bus. The challenges are academic, social, and emotional, and they are worked out in detail, day by day, not just in the classroom, but also at the kitchen table in battles over homework, on the athletic field in crises of confidence, and in every unexpected venue where kids grow in understanding and maturity.

These challenges address in a very basic way the human condition — or more specifically that peculiar part of the human condition known as childhood. They require not just our money but our full attention. Our kids depend on it, as does our civilization.