First Day of the New School Year

Today marked the first day of school in Wauconda, an institute day for teachers, so I had the honor of being the first speaker up to welcome everybody back. It gave me a chance to use some of the information from some of my recent blog posts to talk a little bit about why education is so important.
Enjoy.  

It seems that lately my world has been overrun with things that make no sense to me.  

Last week, a survey by the University of Texas and the newspaper The Texas Tribune showed that only 35% of those responding agreed with the statement “Humans developed from earlier species.”  Only 41% disagreed with the statement “Humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.”  I keep seeing in my mind the Lewis Black video where he now realizes that, for a large number of people, the Flintstones was a documentary. 

And a story popped up in the news about how vaccinations lead to all kinds of serious problems, including most notably, autism.  I thought this nonsense had been put to rest, but every so often it pops up again. The most recent major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed half a million children through their vaccinations and showed without much doubt that there is no link whatsoever between vaccination and autism. The doctor who started this whole antivax scare has been discredited, his medical license revoked, and his research labeled an elaborate fraud by the British Medical Journal. This whole discussion is reminiscent of the advice given in the 1940’s that children should not eat ice cream because it leads to polio. The feeling was that polio cases increased in the summer at almost exactly the same time that children started eating ice cream. Therefore “one of those must cause the other.” Luckily within ten years, researchers had isolated the polio virus and were well on the way to developing a vaccine that has worked very well. In that case misled parents may have withheld ice cream from their children, which has no long lasting consequences.  However when parents withhold vaccinations from their children, they are putting not only themselves, but also all the other children their children come in contact with in danger.  

And a third story made even less sense when I saw that coming in in 6^th place on the box office results this week with a total of $47 million dollars in ticket sales was Smurfs 2.  

Folks, it’s a scary world out there and the level of irrationality has grown to an all time high. And that makes it even more important that we provide our children with the most rigorous education that we can provide. Not because of No Child Left Behind or because of Common Core, but because an education is the surest way to provide for an informed and rational citizenry. Aristotle said, “The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”   

So, the pressures on you as teachers have never been higher. And in some areas the support has never been lower. I have mentioned in the past the results of the Phi Delta Kappan survey on public education that says,  

“Public education – it stinks and teachers are terrible – well, not at my kids’ public schools. Their teachers are great and my kids love it there, but, you know, public education stinks.”   

The Board of Education would like to welcome you to the start of another school year and most importantly, we would like to thank you for the tremendous service you are doing for the children of District 118 and to recognize publicly the significant positive impact you have had on the students who have passed through District 118 schools.   

Thank you very much and have a great year.