Education (2008)

My parents were reared within two miles of each other.  My grandparents and great-grandparents and most of the neighbors in that large rural community were life-long residents.  The house in which my mother and father were reared had survived the Civil War.  The country school which I attended from first grade through twelfth grade graduation was located next to the one-room school where my grandfather attended school with NC Governor Charles Brantley Aycock, who was Governor in 1900. My father’s ancestors had founded Morristown, New Jersey and had moved to Wayne County as hard-working, land-owning farmers, and so it was with my mother’s family. There were thirteen students in my high school graduating class.

The same first grade teacher taught my mother’s four children in the first grade.  As I told Dr. Guy Phillips, one of NC’s great educators at Chapel Hill, who had taken a liking to me even though I was a science major, Miss Dickerson, the first grade teacher, was a real teacher.  The very first day, she got those first graders in line and they stayed in line. The very first morning of each new year, she marched that first grade into the auditorium for the general assembly. This was education at its best. It was never that good before and it will never be that good in the future.  A community school where all the students, the teachers, and the parents all had respect for one another and knew how to behave.  My mother had her last child, a rather rambunctious spoiled boy because the three other children (I was the oldest) were already grown and I and my sister were in college.  I asked my mother if she was going to take this young, spoiled brother to his first grade class.  She said, “I will take him as far as the door.  Miss Dickerson can handle him.”  My father was Chairman of the school board and the same principal, C.R.Lewis, had been principal most of my life (He died at age 100).  My father and Mr. Lewis said “Not one parent, not one teacher, had ever complained about Miss Dickerson.”  She knew what she was doing.

When those students left the first grade, they could all read and write and were well ready for the second grade.  The knew how to behave because from the first day, she got them in line and they stayed in line the rest of their time in school.  Today, we are just playing school, there is little discipline, most students are just socially promoted from one grade to another, and as a Massachusetts educator said recently, “We have just thrown money at the schools, it has not worked. We should close down and start over.”

I knew Senator Jesse Helms before he was a United States Senator.  Since he was in the Senate for thirty-eight years, I knew him when I was a young man just back from the war.  I sent him a news photo before he died showing he and I at a law enforcement appreciation banquet where I introduced him.  I said to Senator Helms one time, “The next time we go to war, we should just throw large bundles of money at the enemy and see if we are successful.”

My largess with scholarships and awards is well known at educational institutions. I have been very brutally honest with the administration of these institutions. I worked my way through eight years, leading to a professional doctorate. When I went to school, there were no scholarships, no Pell Grants. I went to school during the day and worked at night, sold Bibles door-to-door in the summer, covering every “pig path” in eastern North Carolina. (There is no harder work on earth than this, try selling a Bible to pagans.)

I am well familiar with the products of many schools.  I live too frugally and have worked too hard until the age of 79 to throw any money at education or anything else.  I am a 100% disabled, service-connected, totally blind veteran.  And I have had the opportunity to travel the world and know the difficulty students encounter in third-world countries attempting to get an education.  I have not forgotten speaking in a University in Beijing, China, and a group of male students begging me to send them some books such as Hemingway and Faulkner that they had been unable to read because of the regimentation of the communist system.  I have not forgotten a college where I spoke in Nigeria and the attempt made there to educate students under impossible circumstances. 

Almost half the students who enter the first grade in this country never graduate from high school.  Only about one-third of the students who enter college in this country graduate from college.  In our nation’s capital, we spend about $17,000 per year, per student, and the results for money spent are deplorable.

In traveling the world, I have found that those who value education are successful because it is profitable for them to learn to speak several languages. They have the ambition, just as I had the ambition, to make the one life which we are given a courageous challenge. Life is tough enough with a good education. What hope do our students have otherwise?