Several years ago, I giggled when I came across Mark Twain’s famous quote regarding school boards. At the time, it seemed apropos: “God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board.” Hee hee!
Granted, education was a different apple during Twain’s turn of the century, and school boards likely fell square in his arrow’s aim because of his Huck Finn-ish, “light out for the territories” cant — a precursor of modern American Bart Simpsonism, if you will. The lot of it was something to escape, in search of an idealized uncivilized frontier.
Less enchanting, those years ago, was realizing that Twain’s fictionalized flight from responsibility mirrored, at times, his own. Faced with a duel, he caught the next stage out of town. Despite an initial emotional confrontation regarding slavery, the last half of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” results in the runaway slave Jim needlessly imprisoned and Huck ultimately deciding, in essence, to flee.
Twain’s brilliant appeal of a fictionalized perpetual adolescence makes wonderful reading, but his slings and arrows against the self-serving, the needlessly vengeful, and the pompous fall far short of describing Orcas Island’s current school board. As far as I can tell, their task is clear: support public education for future generations of island residents. Their goals are realistic, yet difficult. And they cannot flee.
Frankly, the patient, self-sacrificing actions of this school board deserve our highest esteem. They are striving to provide the opportunity for each and every future island student to become something that Huck never became: an adult.
Thus, the above quote regarding school boards (from Twain’s 1897 “Following the Equator”) deserves a rejoinder. In a speech three years later, Twain remarked: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.”
Please give a wag of your tail to the proposed school bond. It’s the only realistic thing to do.
Maurice Austin
Orcas High School English teacher
