Public education brings us all together

We need public education.

We Americans need institutions like public education to keep us together. There are practices that tend to keep us apart. We get our news from different sources with different views. We live in areas that are labeled conservative or progressive. We practice our faith in churches or temples or synagogues or in our own private ways. We all live in the United States of America, but far too many of us live in our own little segment, our own little island.

Is it important to consider the consequences of these individual divisions? Can our people and our country and our republic survive if there are not commonalities and institutions that we all experience and share? Where will we get our understanding and respect for our heritage and our country? Public education brings us together and provides free and universal opportunities to appreciate, examine and learn the complex, controversial and brilliant experiment of our multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial democratic republic.

Public school classrooms are the learning centers for equality, inclusion, respect, understanding, tolerance and appreciation. Where else do we have the opportunities to meet others on a daily basis and learn from each and every one how important we all are? It’s truly amazing how 4- and 5-year-olds will share and learn and play and laugh with other 4- and 5-year-olds, regardless of how they look, where they come from, how they dress. Isn’t this the essence of the society we want to maintain, of the country we want to pass on to our children? Public education brings us all together.

STEVE JOHNSON

Sagle