In election years, educators come under pressure from the most vocal critics who demand that we teach our youngsters how to earn a living at the expense of teaching them how to live.
The practical-minded, for example, are after mandates for skill training in public schools, or personal finance, or more technical courses. The result is that carpentry, checkbook balancing and fiddling with computer apps are being substituted for languages and world history.
It can be valuable for some youngsters to know what they’re doing while pushing plywood over a table saw, or dissecting a computer or making cartoons for Facebook. And the bona fide service industry is always looking for painstaking mechanics, careful carpenters, precise electricians and plumbers. Their training is crucial; they fix and maintain things that give us safer, more convenient lives. But that knowledge is still no equivalent for learning the state’s role in our lives or the nation’s role in world affairs and how it evolved.
History, for example, reveals our long and agonizing presence in the Middle East, our frayed relations with Europe. China has become a problem, Central and South America are at an abyss, and we barely speak to our neighbors, Canada and Mexico.
Understanding history is important for trade and for peace. Kansas has ties to dozens of regions over the globe. We depend upon them as partners, suppliers and consumers. We rarely understand them.
Communities on the plains are the product of immigrants. Our state has evolved from the influence of people from five continents, a glorious comingling of genealogy, culture and heritage.
History holds crucial lessons, especially for legislators. Kansans may turn to Kenneth Davis, Calder Pickett, Emory Lindquist, David Dary, William Allen White and others for lessons of perseverance and attainment, avarice and power, episodes of gullibility and folly.
We are confronted today with those lessons – in the reasons and ways we share the cost of funding schools, libraries, hospitals, roads and bridges, parks and social welfare programs. We see what happens when history is passed over.
A current issue in Topeka is reapportionment, adjusting the boundaries of legislative districts and the allotment of seats (power) for the state Senate House of Representatives. Over time, populations have shifted from Kansas’s rural west and southeast to the Wichita region and metropolitan northeast. Seven of the state’s 105 counties now elect nearly two-thirds of the Legislature.
In the decades since 1950, each ten-year census has added chapters to a Kansas history of loss. The story holds a backdrop of neglect, of poor planning, of misdeed, of haste taken and opportunity lost. Great Kansas projects – the Turnpike, the lakes and reservoirs, colleges and universities, local school finance, among others – came from collaboration. Partnerships lay in fortifying a wellspring of mutual need, of rural and urban benefit. This was how politics had worked.
For awhile, things improved. Local schools gained firm footing, universities and colleges became institutions of higher learning and valuable research. Kansans would splash in the lakes without going underwater at home in a heavy flood. The Menningers brought mental health out of the closet. Oil, coal, crops and cattle brought spirit to the tableland. The Wheat State became home to Boeing, Cessna, Learjet. And with center-pivot irrigation, southwest Kansas bloomed.
But in time, the energy and benefit of collaboration was neglected, its rationale forgotten or ignored. The politics in partnership was lost to the pursuit of power. In Topeka, the landscape of what matters had become the landscape of what wins.
History and its institutional memory are parked in the shadows. We are faced with a trend in legislating that will short-change the state and the nation. As with pressuring our schools to be more “practical,” legislators are pressured to put tribal allegiance above common purpose.
The threat is to society. If the mass of our young students and our legislators have only skills or motives, vision is misdirected. Without the footings of our history, geography and economics, Kansans are easy prey for demagogues and legislators are easy marks for charlatans. The past holds valuable lessons in our potential for glory and our capability for folly.
