On the Containment of Children

The state budget this year plans reductions of $1.2 billion for schools. The New York Times reports that hundreds of teachers and librarians will be fired. Our memory elephants might remember a press release of May 4, 2000, in which Governor Pataki boasted of implementing $3.7 billion in tax cuts that year alone. The nostalgic might propose that, were the governor to think more broadly or more often, he might consider that, with a $3.7 billion tax increase, we might bring back 1999. Yet the past is as unreclaimable as our students.

A friend teaches middle school in the Bronx, and she tells me things--teachers, principal, secretaries, nurse, and sports coaches--are hopeless. The teachers have conceded that their responsibility is to keep as many young people as possible indoors during business hours. My friend is resigned to the cuts, and says glumly that the most economical thing would be to pasture the kids to playtime and assign eight hours a day of gym.

There are few words for this horror, and fewer for budget cuts falling on top of it: call it the rape of an invalid, or call it what it is, grown men in Albany attacking children. It is a crime in our home, immediate to us, right here. A few anti-war protesters might consider tackling this issue, or going upstate to ask the governor if he wouldn't mind proving he can still pass the Regents. This is a key issue for anyone concerned with the state of affairs in America right now. To pretend foreign wars have nothing to do with domestic education is at once blindered and willful. It is an old idea that education is the preventive for and antidote to violence. It is no accident, I think, that our new spending on war, approaching $150 billion in various allocations, comes in part from stolen lunch money. Our politicians who now celebrate depriving soldiers and civilians of their lives used to prove their patriotism taking knowledge from schoolchildren.

Let us suppose that the plight of the schools and the children is at once so undeniable, so dire, and so long bewailed as to seem trite. The fate of poor students, in New York in particular and America in general, is grim, unforgivable, and neatly ignored. The passion of their advocates passes for overearnestness, their deep seriousness for sentimentality. Let us suppose my own cri de coeur does nothing. What, then, can we do for our young people? I could not agree with my friend that days of phys ed are the answer, remembering my own experiences with rope-climbing, dodgeball, square-dancing, and the other discount hells. I said that we must either remember the words of St. Paul--"I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved"--or we must confront the implications of a monstrous sin of omission. No man of Christian opinions (especially important for those of us who are not Christian), no patriot and no human being could cut education and give children, those few who are trusting and good, hollowed-out echo-chamber minds, unequipped to decipher the world and make a way in it. No, I said hotly, the governor leads us to boldness. If there is not money to teach a child, then we must do the only honorable thing. And that is to construct vast underground warrens of suspended-animation chambers in which our young people may be preserved out of time, their youth in bloom and their minds still fresh until such a future arrives as we are fit to educate them.

You're joking, said my friend, do you really mean to place New York State primary and secondary school students in cryogenic freeze chambers? I am not, I said without pause, though on aesthetic grounds I would prefer rows of glass cylinders filled with a translucent amniotic gel in burnt umber or ultramarine, lit from below. Suspended animation is all that, in the brutalized age of a Pataki, is left conscionable.

And would you believe that she laughed then, a laugh that affirmed me and restored her, that drew the humors back through her veins and balmed our anticipation of a baleful and desolate future? Together we made plans to travel far from Manhattan, to work in schools in Namibia, where there is still a peaceful people, thirsting for knowledge.

The author is a 2002 graduate of Columbia College.