I had my first psychotic break with reality in 1982 when I discovered that my absence from work would only be noticed when I couldn’t be contacted for the white elephant gift exchange at Christmas. That is an exaggeration, but I did say it was a psychotic break. When I boarded the bus to go into the office each day, I had the overwhelming feeling that I was an ant packed into an ant-movement container with many other ants going to jobs that did nothing to move the needle on human progress.
It was a stunning discovery, the result of which was to conclude that I should be a lawyer rather than an engineer. That would solve things! Unfortunately, my wife was newly pregnant with our second child and quitting my job would move me from being a psychotic victim to being a homicide victim - my wife deciding that enough was enough. Although accepted into law school, I gave up the idea for want of cash.
Instead, I had the good fortune to obtain a leave of absence from work and have my employer support my research efforts to obtain a master’s degree. It was quite an adventure and… have I ever told you how longsuffering is my wife? She is as longsuffering as I am periodically psychotic.
In the process of my new academic adventure, I was introduced to Professor Robert Lucas the economist who subsequently (1995) won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his articulation of the theory of rational expectations. I became a big fan of Dr. Lucas and his theory set me off on my exploration of the influence of worldview in the development of Western Civilization. It was a complicated journey to be sure but rational expectations are intrinsically moral decisions anchoring the study of economics on a moral foundation. Think of your rational expectations when you buy something from eBay. Why would you possibly believe that the person at the other end of the transaction is going to deliver what you sent money to buy? It is because you think he or she is basically moral and won’t cheat.
How does this fit with being an ant? I concluded that it was ok to be an ant and that my role in life was to be a good ant, a moral ant with enough humility to recognize that the ant on the bus seat beside me was probably a pretty good ant from whom I could learn stuff. Dr. Lucas put boundaries around my ant psychosis, and I began to enjoy being an ant.
With a master’s degree in hand, I was offered a foreign posting by my employer to which my longsuffering wife gave her assent. I was now an ant in a foreign country which gave me a new perspective on being a Canadian ant. When we returned to Canada in 1988, I looked at the state of antdom and concluded that I needed to get involved in politics.
My father suggested that he and I attend the constituency meeting of an upstart political party and I agreed both out of curiosity and to prevent my father from getting into trouble. It became a six-year apprenticeship in the Canadian political system. Many of the people I worked with became senior political figures in Canada as the party went from strength to strength.
Those early days in the party were exhilarating with the result that I was eventually persuaded to run for school board trustee. The principle of subsidiarity suggests that the greatest influence occurs at the local level of politics. I wanted to be an influential ant and so started low on the political totem pole. As stated, I was persuaded to run by a friend that I met when we were both facing employment difficulties. He thought the most logical outcome of our situation was to find a group of people and take the public education system by storm. In the end, six of us signed on and ran as a team called Class Action. We thought the name was terribly clever and would attract the press attention that we needed given that we had no money. Name recognition is an important part of school board elections in which voter turn-out is notoriously low. This literally means that if teacher’s union members get two family members to vote, the union controls the election outcome. That is how it works. We were going to bust the model.
Our ace in breaking the model was my friend’s father who was a very well known, conservative magazine publisher who would reliably be accused of trying to take over education in the province. He had run a series of boy’s private schools in which corporal punishment was a badge of courage. It was a sure-fire strategy and it worked precisely as anticipated. We had press coverage from the national newspapers and television stations as well as the local press. It was heady stuff.
We were accused of being ultra far right fascists and even racists on one memorable occasion even though we had two visible minority women running with us. One of our running mates, an immigrant mother from Singapore, recounted to us an exchange she had with her rebellious sixteen-year-old daughter. Suspecting that her daughter was skipping school and hanging out at the mall, she went to the school principal and asked to have her daughter brought out of class. When the principal could not locate the daughter, she upbraided him for dereliction of his fiduciary duties and then went to the mall to literally drag her daughter home. Her daughter explained that her mother had no right to make her obey which resulted in a threat to have the daughter sent back to Singapore to live with her grandparents who used disciplinary tactics rejected by the US Marine Corps.
“You can’t make me get on an airplane if I don’t want to!” was met with,
“I didn’t say you would be conscious when you got on the plane!”
We ran with a rough crowd.
Our platform was based on offering a choice of more educational options to parents and we insisted that the system performance be measured by literacy and numeracy tests at three points in a child’s education. If a child failed the tests, the school board would pay for the remedial tutoring.
When this was discussed at an editorial board meeting with a local newspaper, we were accused of “imposing our views” on the education system. My friend tartly responded that this was an unusual position for a corporation whose business plan required people to know how to read.
Another plank to our offering was to pay for kindergarten education (it had been eliminated by the government) for any parent who agreed to work at home with their child using free curriculum that would result in their child reading by the end of kindergarten. For this we were decried in the press as fascist Nazis. Like a good private school spanking, we wore the epithet as a badge of honour. Maybe a hall mark of the fascist Nazis was that their children knew how to read. It doesn’t balance their evil, but it is something.
At the end of all things, we lost magnificently. Late in the campaign my private school attending friend, in a national interview, allowed that spanking was a tool to be investigated. In an act of “friendly fire”, I chimed in that the school should strap my son rather than subject him to the slow drip of academic poison that attended his more rambunctious performances in elementary school. That guaranteed us front page coverage in Canada’s Globe and Mail and cooking our electoral goose as it were. It also guaranteed the disapprobation of our running mates and spouses. Not to mention my son, whose eyebrows shot up at my suggestion that he be strapped. In truth the goose was cooked from the beginning because we did not have an effective “get out the vote” strategy but it was satisfying to blame the defeat on my friend.
What is the point to all this? Well, first it affords me an excuse for a trip down memory lane. The fun we had more than made up for the name calling and door knocking and sign putting up. It was an axiomatic tilting at windmills. After a lifetime of such tilting, I can honestly say that this one was well worth the effort. I can also say that, as “faint hope” petardiers seek to blow up the castle door, so too did we seek to blow up the school system. Perhaps, it is well that we were denied the opportunity to do so. But perhaps, too, the world also needs more windmill tilting Don Quixotes.
Four years after my first foray into school board politics, I was persuaded to run again only this time my son also ran in an adjacent region. It would have been unbearable for my son to outdo my vote count, so I was more active in the second campaign. All to no avail. I both lost to my opponent and to my son. We can grow from such humiliations. The national press got a kick out of the father-son angle and the French press got lots of good quotations from my son. His rambunctious sense of humour translated beautifully from grade school to the election campaign. Once again, the experience was very enjoyable only this time it was an experience shared with four of the other five candidates running. The fifth candidate was the union representative who, perhaps by staying away from us, won the election. I thought she missed most of the value of the experience.
Public education today is still in a pedagogic mess in my view but for reasons that were never anticipated during our run to become board trustees. The system now offers most of the innovations that we were promoting thirty years ago (classical, language-centered, sex-separated, science-centered, technical/trades-centered etc.) but it continues to aggravate parents with forays into non-academic, social nonsense and continuing attempts to usurp parental authority in the development and education of children.
So, if you must go through life being an ant - and you do - then the rational thing to do is look for ways to have fun with the other ants. Running for school board is something to consider in generating that fun. After the first time you are called a fascist, you don’t notice subsequent epithets.
If you live in the US, an organization that will guarantee the “fascist” slur is Moms for Liberty (Moms for Liberty). It is advertised as a “far right” group which is shorthand for “they are getting stuff done” and they have an impressive record of success so are worth getting to know.
If you live in Canada, just let a few friends know that you are considering an electoral run, and you will have new friends coming out of the woodwork. Enjoy the ride, Ant!