Just about one hundred years after the inception of modern institutional schooling in America, the little town of Benson in western Vermont set a national record by voting down its proposed school budget twelve times.
The year of the last defeat was 1995. Shortly after the vote, the state of Vermont stepped in to override the judgment of Benson voters. Cynics said there was only so much the ephors were prepared to tolerate to maintain the illusion of law and democracy before their patience wore thin.
Before victory for the school district was snatched from the jaws of defeat, Charlie Usher, the assistant superintendent in Benson, declared his bewilderment at what he called the town’s “irresponsibility.” Said Usher, “We should all try to get at the root of why these people are willing to let their schools fall apart.”
The principal at Benson School, Theresa Mulholland, was characterized in Education Week, a major journal of the teaching industry, as a lady who regarded the town as an ornery child. Miss Mulholland told a reporter that nobody in Benson had a good explanation for what they were doing. “I think they just want to say ‘NO,” she added. Benson was like a Special Ed kid; Benson just didn’t get it. Schools need lots of money, or as Charlie Usher suggested, they fall apart.
The Education Week piece in which I read about these things covered every inch of a two-page tabloid spread, yet nowhere could I find a single word indicating the problem in Benson might just be that its taxpayers and voters didn’t regard the Benson system as their own, but a hostile insertion in their body politic. Nor was there even a hint that Benson long ago may have abandoned belief that what goes on in Vermont schools is all that educational, or should be considered an essential enterprise worth a substantial part of their incomes to promote. The Benson point of view was missing.
I read this journal account of a little town in western Vermont and its defiance of the state school institution pretty carefully, and when I was finished I read it again. Three more times. I sensed some important message was buried there, right under Education Week’s nose. On the fourth run-through I discovered what I was looking for. Let me review the case. See if you, too, can arrange the facts so that a different conclusion is reached about who is irresponsible in Benson and who is not.
Let’s start with the matter of Assistant Superintendent Usher. It’s plain as the nose on your face, isn’t it? Somewhere out of sight a full superintendent is hidden. What? You say nothing is odd at all about that? You only react that way because I haven’t told you yet that the entire school district of Benson has not ten, not five, but exactly one school in it. And that school’s enrollment is not one thousand, not five hundred, four hundred, three hundred, or even two hundred children. The Benson School had 137 children enrolled at the time of the article deploring the irresponsibility of local voters.
Incidentally, the school has a principal, too. Apparently protocol in Vermont demands that the local school leadership must have an assistant superintendent through whom orders from the superintendent (who represents de facto the state and federal bureaucracies) can be relayed. The collective cost for these three high-ranking pedagogues is, I estimate, about $250,000 a year, a figure that includes the hidden costs of their lifelong benefits. That works out to the better part of $2,000 a kid, $1,824.82 rounded off to be precise. That’s nice work if you can get it and this crew doesn’t even have to trouble itself with teaching. It boggles any mind capable of being boggled.
Have I told you yet about the new Benson School that replaced a perfectly sound and handsome structure to the delight of the construction industry? This school would have been rejected outright by local taxpayers who liked the school they had, but when the state condemned the old school for not having wheelchair ramps and a considerable list of other features nobody had ever considered essential parts of a school before, Benson resistance surrendered. The taxpayers were told (by the state, of course) that costs of reaching “code compliance” were virtually identical with the cost of building a new school. Benson residents assumed they had no choice so the bond issue was voted. It only passed narrowly in spite of active coercion on the part of the state, a harbinger of what was ahead.
When the bill came for the new Benson School, property taxes went up 40 percent in a single year. Quite a shock to those local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails. Local school people and state representatives said nothing should be too good for the kids, but 40 percent in a town where half the residents can’t afford regular dental care seems to be pushing things.
Oddly enough, I have direct experience with Vermont’s condemnation of sound school structures from the town of Walden, hardly more than a speck on the map two to three hours northeast of Benson in the most beautiful hill country you can imagine. A few years ago, four sound little one-room schools dating from the 19th century—serving 120 kids with just four teachers and no administrators or support staff—were condemned by the same state education crew from Montpelier that gave Benson the one-two punch later on.
I was asked by a citizens group in Walden to drive up and speak at a rally to save these rather remarkable community schools, beloved of kids, parents, and townspeople. I regret being unable to show you a picture of the charming buildings, but if I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden a moose was rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess’s home you’ll be able to imagine them. Those schools came straight out of the Vermont postcard book this nation has always loved, and, while we don’t send kids to school for architecture appreciation, anyone who tells you the look of a place doesn’t affect the quality of what goes on inside is nuts.
The group I came to speak for had already defeated a school consolidation project once the previous year that would have required kids who now could walk to school to climb on buses and ride as many as fifty miles. Now the ephors in Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and seduction (parents were promised a swimming pool in the consolidated school to be built) wouldn’t work, coercion would.
Vermont condemned the one-room schools of Walden, not because they were unsafe but because it wanted them closed. Then the town was deluged with official estimates stating that to bring those one- rooms up to code would cost, you guessed it, as much as building a new consolidated school would. And if the taxpayers still balked, well, who is to say that new regulations couldn’t be passed to increase the burden on the town?
Our only hope seemed to be to get a credible bid low enough that voters could see they had been flim-flammed. Even though the final date of submission had passed, it was a good bet we could provoke a strong voter reaction if we could publicize a true cost to upgrade the one-rooms, revealing the state had other motives for wanting these lovely little schools closed than regard for children.
As we discussed what to do, I suddenly remembered that by a freak chance I personally had once had dealings with a Vermont master architect. At the time I was living in Provincetown in a large apartment at the Captain Lysander Inn designed by the man. Every day from my windows I could watch him turning the garage in the small parking lot into an attractive, free-standing home. .
In ten weeks a lovely home stood where a ramshackle frame garage had been. I was so impressed I asked the fellow up for a beer and got to know him a little. He said that he taught at the University of Vermont, and that he was reluctant to preach theory to his students without practical experience building things himself. On the chance he might be interested in our dilemma I called his home in Montpelier. Two hours later he was in Walden touring the condemned schools.
We briefed him on the generic motivation being fronted for pushing consolidation—that the one-room concept was outmoded—and that this had been reinforced by assistance from fantastic building code amendments: no wheelchair ramps, “unsuitable” bathroom facilities for physically impaired people, no space specifically designed as science labs, no swimming pool, and many similar lacks. The fact that forests, meadows, streams, and ponds were in close proximity to each of the doomed schoolhouses so that swimming and science facilities existed in abundance, or that com-munity tradition provided easily for the rare wheelchair student to be lifted up and down the low steps of the one- story buildings by the teacher and classmates cut no ice with rulebook keepers.
But the actual reasons for putting such places out of business were much different: first and foremost was the embarrassing fact these schools had delivered quality service at a very low cost for more than a century. In competition with children at up-to-date facilities Walden kids shone. Their very success made arguments for expensive schooling elsewhere more difficult to support. Another decisive charge against this kind of community schooling was that everything in such places worked against professionalization and standardization. Parents were too intimate with the buildings, knew the teachers too well as neighbors, and were too familiar with every boy and girl and their families to allow a smooth professional governance to be administered from afar.
My friend the architect pronounced official estimates for code compliance “dishonest.” The estimates, he said, were three times higher than the work could be done even allowing for a normal profit. The architect also knew the principals in the politically well-connected construction firms submitting the inflated estimates. “The purpose of this is to kill the one- room schools,” he said. “All these guys will be paid off one way or another with state work as their reward for forwarding the Education Department agenda.” But when I asked him to give us a counter-estimate we might use to wake up voters he replied, “If I did I would never get another building job in Vermont.”
Two years later, on the other side of the state in Benson, I got to witness the classic illustration in dollars and cents how the political state and its licensed allies can be turned loose to feed on working men and women. Where Education Week saw deep mystery over citizen disaffection, simple facts put a different spin on the narrative. In a jurisdiction serving 137 children, a number that could have been handled in the Walden schools with five teachers and no supervisors other than the town’s traditions and the willing oversight loving parents had always provided, taxpayers had been set upon by this swarm of pedagogical locusts:
- A non-teaching superintendent
- A non-teaching assistant superintendent
- A non-teaching principal
- A non-teaching assistant principal
- A full-time nurse
- A full-time guidance counselor
- A full-time librarian
- Eleven full-time schoolteachers
- An unknown number of secretaries, coaches, part-time specialists, nutritionist, custodian, etc.
- Space, desks, equipment, technology for all of these.
One hundred thirty-seven little people. Is there a soul living who believes Benson’s kids are better served in their new school with this mercenary army than Walden’s 120 were served in their four one-room schools with four teachers? If so, the customary ways we measure educational success don’t record this superiority. This is a peculiar Nanny-From-Hell style of pedagogy, forcing people to take medicine they neither need nor want, pills that bankrupt them and dumb down their children because the continual “interventions” necessary to justify such a labor force ruin interest and ability at the same time.
Forcible redistribution of the income of others to provide work for pedagogues—and a support staff that several years ago surpassed teachers in their numbers—is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of children, families, towns, and neighborhoods. The more makework that has to be found for school employees, the worse for kids. If ever the expression “less is more” has an appropriate application it is in the pursuit of the ideal called Education that must be largely self-managed or it cannot happen.
Suppose we just eliminated the first seven positions from the list of functionaries paid off with Benson property taxes, plus three of the eleven teachers and all the accessory personnel. The work these folks currently do would be absorbed by the remaining eight teachers, the schoolkids, and whatever community volunteer assistance we could recruit.
The professional staff, now self-administering like doctors, lawyers, and cab drivers, would become genuinely professional. Benson’s tax-poor would be spared the road to penury and might be expected to repay the favor with an outburst of good will toward the town school. And the net upshot for everyone would be a pleasant, low-stress laboratory for learning tailored to the individual children—just like the people of Walden once had.
Benson, Vermont is a tragedy without a villain. It signals the presence among us of an ancient mathematical philosophy that seeks to centralize and systematize control of human behavior. This philosophy requires all of us and all our children to be schooled to accept an economy that has stolen work from millions upon millions of independent livelihoods that once were the standard of America’s dream, and transferred it through legislation, licensing, government subsidy, propaganda, regulation, media persuasions, policing, and courts—but especially through the systematic de-intellectualization and demoralization of school children—into private and state corporate hands.
To bring such a lofty abstract charge down to the beer glass level, where once this nation encouraged hundreds of thousands of microbreweries, each affording a good independent living and good beer to many, now a half-dozen giants command the field with a low-level, standardized product. It is true many jobs are thus created, but most of them are functionary ones, and as downsizing has shown us in a preview of coming attractions, radically unstable even in times of record profits.
Brewing, candy-making, tomato culture, dressmaking, freight haulage, midwifery, entertainment, bus service, training of many sorts, and a host of other possibilities for independent livings that make strong and stable communities and offer the quality that craft and hand-work brings, have been systematically shrunk in the 20th century to allow a corporate few to direct the lives of the many. The whole project takes us so far from the republican ideal of Jefferson and Jackson, and so close to the misconceptions of Marx, reinterpreted for a new age, that no healthy society can emerge while it is sovereign.
In such a never-never utopia, forced schooling discourages children, families, and towns like Walden and Benson from regarding themselves as independent producers of goods, services, and in the last analysis, of their own lives. People who pay allegiance to the ultimate corporate ideal, the global unicorporation—whether through its public manifestations in the ambitious state or its private counterparts—must be willing to live as functionaries themselves, in thrall to a system racing out of control. The fundamental assumption is that ordinary people are incompetent to plan their own lives, rear their own children, or have a say in governance. The government/corporate nanny cares for all. School pre-pares that way according to the logic of the growing system.
We should face what we have made. Only through Benson-type schooling can the lessons of proper dependency be learned. Schools must wean children from their wellsprings of personal power in the family and community. It must teach us to be weak if associational life is to be strong. School must waste our time in preparation for lives that waste time, hurrying us up to wait for someone else to make our important decisions. School must prepare us to be downsized and outsourced by demonstrating that loyalty and principles are illogical atavisms.
We need to face the truth. We can’t really afford school reform. What prevents it is not a pack of faceless human vampires scheming to suck the blood of the innocent taxpayers of Benson, Vermont; the enemy is not human but an abstraction run amok, a reckless macroeconomy and its small group of technicians frantic to unify the entire planet and to interconnect everything before it loses its tenuous grip on things. The logic is inexorable. In Benson we can easily see past the camouflage of a local conflict between stingy conservatives and the champions of progress into the beating heart of an idea. Those much-maligned taxpayers who voted the school budget down twelve times scraped enough virtual skin off the monster for us to see its mechanism.
A century of frightening evidence has by now accumulated to show that collective imagination abstracted into such institutions as big government, big institutions like managed health care and state-controlled “higher” education, and big global businesses—impressive as all these are, yet have proved a colossal failure in their primary obligation—to design satisfying work full of meaning and opportunity for the men, women, and children of the nation. This is their primary obligation unless they are prepared to risk social disaster.
The duty of offering significance to everyone who wanted it was once discharged as well as fallible humanity is capable by allowing individuals, families, little businesses, and local communities to decide what to do and not to do. Local leadership, as porous as good Swiss cheese, made these choices, and if they were wrong for you, liberty existed to walk from Dedham to Sudbury and find something more suitable. The great buzzing dialectic of non-stop American argument was our gilt-edge guarantee of the best chance for a good life attuned to our individuality. Not being rich but being free was the unique American dream existing in no other place as a national interest.
At the heart of the problem of American schooling is that it sets out deliberately to overturn the way we used to be and desperately need and want to be again. The freedom to write our own scripts in the short time we have before our deaths is the primary good. It cannot be replaced by any service the government provides in exchange for centralizing us.
The Benson school system of one school is determined to process the children of Benson into the universal system aborning. It and the state of Vermont and the federal school bureaucracy in Washington and all the corporate board members on school reform teams around the land working feverishly for national standards and national testing demand the right to care for us, even if it kills us which it surely will.
That is the logical tragedy of Benson, Vermont.