"The Better Angels of Our Nature": Improving Public Education #2

"What does a kid think you are saying to him, about her, if you're sending them to a crummy building every day? If you send them to a building that not only needed repair this week, or this month, but has been in need of repair for the whole time they've been a student?"
--Voiceover from the Hands on D.C. video, below

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
--Abraham Lincoln, "First Inaugural Address"

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They clear rats from school ventilators. They wire schools to gift them with the world beyond the walls and walled-in textbooks.

If they have money, they give college years to those who otherwise would not have them. If they have no money, they give things as precious: their own things at hand, their expertise, their skills and muscle and labor - for one single day each year.

In hallways and classrooms, dingy grays give way to azure blues, daisy golds.  In bathrooms, paintbrushes wave, wave like wands, and conjure flowers into bloom on walls where once gloom reigned.

And at day's end, the hands wave too - human hands, in multitudes, too like flowers, like wands - and conjure different things to bloom, from within each waving self. At day's end.

Here's some magic for you: four minutes bottled timeless from one such day. Watch, and try to see those conjured things:

Did you see them at all? See them faintly flare, then faintly flare away? Those evanescent wings, Mayfly-like, of the better angels of our nature?

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(Hm. Sue me. Typical English teacher. But things like Hands on D.C. bring That Side out of me. Especially on Sunday.)

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Seeing the D.C. student graduate at the end of that film, thanks to the effort of others - seeing the whole lovely clip - reminds me of Habitat for Humanity.

Anybody who's volunteered for Habitat has probably experienced it. The joys of the backaches, of the conjuring with hands and other magic things a better reality than what was there before.

I experienced it in Sri Lanka a few years ago. In one week, my team of three dug a cesspool ten feet deep and six feet square - with square-shaped hoes. The villagers owned no shovels. (The grandmothers, by the way, dug alongside us and outworked us by orders of magnitude.)

Digging that latrine cost about as much as a week at a resort in Thailand.

I'm going to Thailand tomorrow. First for work (so I'll be a bit quiet in the comments next week), and then for a week's vacation - a belated honeymoon, really - in a (cut-rate) island resort.

The resort will be nice. But not as nice as that week digging latrines in Sri Lanka, among better natures. (And I have to share this last photo with you, because this child was a masterpiece of nature.)

So: How can we all improve public education? By doing for schools what we used to do, long ago, for barns, and what we do today in Habitat for Humanity. Pitch in with our community for a day - and transform a school. If you're the type, create an organization like Hands on D.C. for the long haul.

The difference made in that one day will last far, far longer. Hands on D.C. showed it all already, though.

Have a good week.