By Rob Rosen
My first semester of college, I stumbled into a fifth-century Greek history class. I knew nothing of Greek history and nothing of the professor, Russell Meiggs, an Oxford don and at that time the world’s foremost authority on fifth-century Athens. Professor Meiggs began the first class reading from a shard of pottery used as a voting ballot in the Athenian Assembly. This vote was an ostracon, a vote to banish or exile a citizen and the origin of the word “ostracism.” This ballot was cast for Thucydides, a general and soon to be historian. The inscription attributed to Hyperbolus (origin of the word “hyperbole” or overblown) went well beyond a simple yes; it was an arrestingly foul inscription. Meiggs’ point was that ancient Greeks were not marble statues but real people working out their differences energetically in a vibrant political demos – I was totally hooked.
My family came to Warren 14 years ago. We wanted to live in a ski town, a place where real people went to real work every day; we wanted to send our kids to the local public school and, in retrospect, I realize I wanted to be part of a “demos.” Two years later my daughter’s wonderful first-grade teacher got “riffed.” We were upset and my neighbors suggested if I wanted to do something about it, I should run for the school board — so I did. My first Town Meeting Day as a board member was a disaster. Citizens stood up, vented their frustrations about taxes and asked lots of questions I couldn’t answer. Thank you, Mac Rood, for helping to pass the budget that year and many years thereafter.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t answer those questions. Soon after, a small group of us — board members, school administrators and the most vocal citizens — got together. We agreed to spend a year studying the problem and see what we could do. What happened that year was one of the greatest experiences of my life. At the start, we disagreed strongly but agreed to put our differences aside, study every bit of information we could find and then consider answers. I learned an awful lot, as did everyone else, and in the end we came up with answers none of us had considered. Our answer really worked as it delivered a high standard of education, low costs and increasing enrollment and it has worked to this day. So thank you, John Donaldson, Adam Greshin, Andreas Lehner, Laurie Jones, Jim Parker and Bob McNamara, for teaching me that the “demos” can really work and when it does it’s pretty powerful.
I now worry, a lot, for the future. Not for our children, they are off to a great start. My kids are a testament to what a nurturing small town and a great education can do, but I am very worried for our grandchildren. I am worried, given what is happening at the state, supervisory union and local level, what type of education system we will leave them. Act 46 is a big “experiment” we are about to perform on the kids, an experiment where a lot is at stake and where there is absolutely no evidence that it will work. Given our recent experiments with single-payer health care (we didn’t figure out how to pay for it), the health insurance exchange (we couldn’t figure out how to build it and hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars in the process), as well as other large school district and system “experiments” in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Detroit and Flint, all with results that can only be described as post-apocalyptic, you would think we would be a bit more cautious and carefully study before we act.
History does have lessons if you bother to stop and listen. Hyperbolus and his supporters won the vote and exiled Thucydides. With a lot of time on his hands, Thucydides wrote a book about his times, The Peloponnesian War, arguably the first and finest history ever written. Meiggs made us read the book, every page of it, and in it Thucydides chronicles the death of Pericles and many of the other great Athenian leaders to a typhus plague, the rise of the demagogues (“a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument”), and how once in power they exiled Thucydides, engineered the suicide of Socrates and sent the Athenian navy, carrying the flower of Athenian citizenry, to Egypt and Sicily all for a grandiose “experiment” in empire and treasure. The results were disastrous for democracy and the city, relegating it to the backwaters of history where it remains today. Thank you, Thucydides, for reminding me many times in my life that “Ignorance is bold and knowledge is reserved.”
As I move on from the Warren School Board, I would like to pass the following to those who come next: If you think you know something, you probably don’t, particularly when people’s emotions are involved. Take your time and use your critical facilities to study what others have done before. To borrow a bit from Mark Twain and George Santayana, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme and those who choose to ignore history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.
Rosen is a former member of the Warren School Board.
