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Sadly, we can judge Legislatur by its cover

 
Published March 22, 1998|Updated Sept. 12, 2005

The schools gladly take money from a chain of breastaurants. Wholesome breastaurants, of course.

They build new schools that are crowded as soon as they open.

They stuff children in trailers, even though trailers are unsafe for living things in extreme weather.

Nothing changes until the Legislature is embarrassed into action.

It couldn't get any worse. Then it does.

When a member of the Legislature suggests school districts be forced to give every student a complete set of textbooks to take home, people clutch their chests and reach for the phone to call 911.

There's an emergency, all right. Somebody in the Legislature wants to do the right thing.

The rest of those dopes listen to me as little as to anybody else but the lobbyists, so what's the harm in saying it?

Anybody who rejects this idea from state Sen. Anna Cowin, R-Leesburg, out of hand ought to kiss his favorite special interest goodbye, quit and go home.

Don't tell me the school districts already have the money. If they do, why can't they keep up with the rising demand for textbooks as the number of kids in the schools grows?

Don't tell me the state doesn't have the money. What else are they going to use that tobacco money for, except as another reason to squabble?

Don't tell me kids are learning so much on computers that books are becoming irrelevant.

Were we told to abandon our cars as soon as Sputnik was launched because pretty soon we'd all be buzzing around town in rockets?

The fact that Cowin's proposal made the front page is evidence of how low we've sunk. That even school officials are objecting illustrates just how beaten down they are.

Books are serious business. They have a beginning, a middle, an end. They have heft. If you lose a book, you have some explaining to do.

You can go back to a book again and again _ unlike eminently disposable worksheets or even computers. What does a kid do when he doesn't have one at home?

When you pick up a book and touch the type on the page, you're following the trail of somebody else's thoughts. You're forced to think on your own, without those interactive bells and whistles. The only interaction is between your mind and the page.

This takes work. The work is supposed to be its own pleasure, a pleasure different from just clicking the video remote or moving a joystick.

This is quite outdated thinking, of course, right up there with expecting kids to do homework each night.

And this is what gives Cowin's idea such power.

When you went home from school, you had books under your arm, in your backpack.

Now when your child comes home from school, the only thing he carries is news about the kid who got caught with a knife.

Your child's safety ought to be a given. But it has disappeared like textbooks, like homework. You begin to suspect the bottom is falling out of the school system. Pretty soon you start paying more attention to your friends, who all but mortgage body and soul to pay private school tuition.

But you want to believe in the public schools. Believing in them is a way of expressing faith in your community. Aren't you giving up on it if you flee to the private schools?

Now, to dream:

Wouldn't it be nice if the Legislature talked seriously about the little detail that Cowin slipped into an early state Senate version of the new state budget?

Dream on.