Here's an embarrassing development for Tennessee.

Senator Obama as been "Husseined" by The Tennessee Republican Party.

Link...

While there are many important points to consider in today's The Daily Times article about the rally for Judge Young, I can't get past my embarrassment of hearing our county mayor talk about "testicular fortitude."

I think that he was talking about us, but whatever he was saying is lost on me because all I can think is..."he did NOT just say 'testicular fortitude.'"

In a personal conversation, a Maryville resident said that her neighbors are coming out after dark to water their lawns and gardens.

What's the view from where you are?

Are residents taking our water situation seriously?

What are we thinking?

Our director of schools has interpreted data collected about public preferences for a single high school as a clear indication that people desire a common experience. (See R. Neal's post below for link to full article)

I have another interpretation. People’s preferences for a single high school indicate a confused sense of nostalgia and a failure of leadership.

Nostalgia: People’s visions of a small-town high-school life are really less about having a single high-school that unifies than having a school small enough that they are truly known as people. Cheering on a town’s single football team against "foreign" rivals (from just down the road) is, quite frankly, a shallow way to build a shallow sense of community. Strong community spirit comes from pride in a community’s choices…in this case, we have a chance to be proud of how we plan for every young citizen to have a great education.

Arguably, the best feature of public schools is that students come into close contact with ideas, identities, abilities, and beliefs that are different from their own (this feature is much harder to come by in private schools). This close contact challenges students to either defend their ways of thinking and being in the world or to change their ways of thinking and being in the world. Course content gives them the tools and practice they need to think through these challenges. In a word, this is education.

Large secondary schools do not allow for this close contact. Rather, stereotypes and narrow thinking are encouraged as students must spend their time simply trying to carve out a space for themselves amid the masses.

Failure of leadership: There is nothing surprising in data showing that people are resistant to and fear change and that people will choose the option that proposes the least amount of change. It is easy for us to sacrifice (other) people’s homes to cobble on to a high school we're afraid of changing in any meaningful way. It is hard to think through new ways of educating our children.

Great leadership helps us imagine new ways of moving forward and helps us not be afraid of change.

Where is our great leadership?

A 9/30/07 letter to the editor in The Daily Times proposed using remote parking lots and shuttle buses to Maryville High School as an alternative to paving over the neighborhood surrounding the high school in order to expand the school's capacity.

While I respect this forward-thinking transportation solution, I think we need to refocus the conversation. I am dismayed that we are talking about transportation solutions before education solutions. We need to pull these issues apart.

We exhaust ourselves planning for our cars. We seem unable to separate conceptually human beings from the steel that transports them. We conflate cars and citizenship, and we build communities that require people to have access to cars in order to fully participate in the community. We plan as if hospitality to cars in our downtowns or high schools or neighborhoods is the same as hospitality to people.

The truth is that too often we build spaces and host activities that aren't worth much of a commitment. We'll only participate or shop or eat when it is easy...when the commitment requires little more than the time it takes to navigate our cars through drive-through windows or into curbside pick-up spaces.

On the other hand, there are spaces and activities that are worth our commitment, and we participate even if car access isn't easy. We figure out how to get there because we want to be there. As a community we need to focus on building spaces and hosting activities worth caring about...worth committing to. Transportation to those spaces and activities will follow.

Let's make the Maryville High School expansion discussion about education. When we figure out the best way(s) to educate our children, there will be myriad ways of dealing with transportation. The transportation solution should follow and fit the education solution.