Scrooge school

Next week I will read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to the kids at school. Last year it took me eight straight hours and left me with a raspy throat, but I can’t wait to do it again.

See, every child ought to know what life would be like without the good, the true, and the beautiful, and who better to teach them than Scrooge?

Scrooge, you may recall, was a man who stood for early bedtimes and cold sleeping temperatures, dark houses and art-free walls.

While the world under his window was slip-sliding its merry way down snowy streets and drooling at gleaming roasted geese in the butcher’s shop, Scrooge was upstairs scooping thin, tasteless, gray porridge into his anger-shriveled mouth. The only thing tighter than his fist was his permanent scowl with which he greeted the rosy-cheeked carolers who bravely dared to summon him to cheer.

Scrooge believed in hard work, long hours, and prisons for the poor.

If he had his way, we would all show up each morning at oh-dark-thirty to spend our days, all seven of them, bent over the only thing in life that matters—the accumulation of money—and drag home at bedtime only to do it all again the next day.

It sounds (forgive me in advance) like our public education system.

I kid you not; there is an elementary school down the street that looks for all the world like a maximum-security penitentiary. Solid gray, windowless, not a tree in sight, it is so depressing it makes most prisons I’ve seen look homey. Scrooge himself might have been the architect—who else would build such a monstrosity for children?

Despite overflowing coffers, Scrooge wasn’t interested in the acquisition of anything beautiful. The sheer accumulation of money, none of which was ever spent on any comfort for himself or for others, is a sad goal indeed. Yet aren’t we guilty of the same thing when we trim the “fat” from our school budgets by cutting things like art and music programs? We are as institutionalized as Scrooge when all we measure education by are test scores and national rankings.

Calling the arts “optional” or “ancillary” is like saying the heart is as disposable as the appendix. We can’t cut the arts and then bemoan the undernourished, thin-souled states of our children. If we create nothing but Scrooge’s grim, utilitarian culture of despair (Common Core, anyone?), why shouldn’t our kids cut, smoke, drink, and shoot themselves into oblivion?

I’m not saying that every or even most public schools are this bad off (yet), nor that only public schools can fall under Scrooge’s nasty spell. Even tiny private schools like the one where I teach are vulnerable if we don’t consider education’s ultimate goal. We all need to take heed. Important as they are, even adding (or keeping) arts programs isn’t enough to save the system when we have no idea what we are aiming at in the first place. And that’s assuming we believe the system can be saved and that we even want to.

Because, if creating soulless, heartless minions who rank well but care about nothing except their grades, educational pedigrees, résumés, and bank statements is our goal, we are well on our way.

But if our goal is something else, we need to have a Scrooge-esque epiphany.

And that’s no humbug.