Blog Your Blessings: Text

On Monday, my daughter couldn't wait to show her fourth-grade teacher the replica of the Declaration of Independence that she had bought as a souvenir in Williamsburg,Virginia. As I watched her little legs carry her and her overburdened backpack to the school bus that morning, my mind's eye replayed all the images of paper and pen that we had seen while we were in Colonial Williamsburg. Every class of society had a pen, ink, and paper--from the royal governor to officers and soldiers, to children. The book maker's shop faced the printer's; even the floor of the church was inscribed with the names of worshipers and the pews were filled with prayer books.

Text was everywhere.

Literacy, it seems to me, was the best weapon in the Patriots' arsenal. Put alongside that a confidence in the ordinary person's ability to reason and respond appropriately, and you've got yourself a revolution led by words. Everything else followed. Literacy is power. It is also a great leveler; who has knowledge can bring it to bear on experience and so become wise. Neither wealth nor poverty need come between us and knowledge. Anyone can get a library card and hit the books and make life better.

Watching the bus take my daughter away, I found myself thinking about the bus itself. Each one costs a couple of hundreds of dollars a day to run. That's stunning. We build and employ these mammoth yellow things because we cherish freedom that comes from literacy. Why else develop a transportation system for the express purpose of taking children from their homes and placing them inside a school building so teachers can guide their reading?

Our government began with a single-page document that began with what it called self-evident, or obvious, facts: that we are created equal and that God has blessed us with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Governments, our founders said, exist to secure these rights. So important was the argument of this document that it was read in public venues up and down the colonies in those days that led to revolution. The text was everywhere.

About 15 years ago, I used to cover education for a small town newspaper. Whenever I needed to talk with the high school principal, I'd go up at dismissal time. Always, I had to walk through the fleet of rumbling buses to get to the building. I loved it right down to the stink of the burning diesel because all those buses represented the great public gift of education to our children and a sure belief that each of us has the potential and the right to learn well and do well.

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