On the day after Labor Day, Greenfield Community College opened its doors for the 54th year to all who choose higher education as a path to a better life.
All who work at GCC understand the profound privilege it is to serve our students, their families and to this community, along with the responsibility we have. The faculty and staff at GCC, like educators around our community, deeply understand that an education today has never been more important to student, community, state and nation.
There is a great deal of attention given to the question about the value of an education these days. Towns throughout the commonwealth struggle each year to make budgets work for parents, taxpayers and all in the schools, while the national average cost of attending a private college or university is now about $50,000 per year. At an instate public college it is about $25,000, and at a community college it is about $11,500.
The costs of education are increasingly segregating cities, towns and students, while the ensuing debt load is increasingly debilitating for graduates. And although the return on investment studies for the college degree are very favorable, the fiscal perspective and analysis alone cannot fully calculate the sustaining value of an education.
A quick story. Mabou is a small town on the west coast of Cape Breton that looks and feels a little like Colrain on the water. It is a small farming and fishing community of hard-working families. Fiddle music is as much a part of their life as TV is here in the states.
Every summer we drive the 13.5-hour trip from Greenfield north through New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. crossing the causeway into beautiful Cape Breton to visit family.
I had received my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin just before one particular summer visit. As a community college graduate — the first to attend college in my family, earning the PhD held a great deal of meaning to me. So I felt pretty good about my achievements, and I was feeling pretty darn cool. Dr. Pura, oh yeah!
My brother-in-law kept horses, mostly for buggy rides for all the nieces and nephews from the Boston area who visit every year. On the first night of that particular visit, something spooked one of the horses, and she got out of the barn. This was pretty big news in that small farming and fishing village — as you might imagine it would be. As the week went on, the concern increased.
Early one morning, as I was sitting on the front porch with my first cup of coffee in hand, a neighbor walking up the dirt road came up to the porch and said, “Your horse is down at the beach.”
I thanked her, grabbed a bucket of water and some hay and walked down to the beach. There was the horse. She drank a bit, ate a little and off we both went back to the house.
That Friday night, we went to the Celeidth down at the Mabou Tennis Courts to listen to music and to dance. About an hour after we arrived, my brother-in-law came over and said that I made a pretty good impression with the locals.
“Why is that?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “the word is out that even though you had the Ph.D, you were pretty smart after all.”
You see, they were more impressed that I had enough sense to bring water and some food to fetch the horse than any trumpeted title.
The truth is that getting a degree does not mean you are smart. We all know some folks who went off to college but are living examples of the fact that common sense is not all that common. We also know that a great number of very smart people have no formal college education or degree. Many of the farmers, machinists and small business owners here in our community are examples of those with wisdom and intelligence that have created a meaningful and sustainable life. (Take another look at the beautiful documentary “Root, Hog or Die” for evidence of that fact.)
But, I was reminded of that story on my visit to Cape Breton this summer as I drove past Mabou’s new high/middle school just outside the center of the town. It is a beautiful building. More significant than the building, however, was the huge statement by the citizens of that community, region and province about the importance of education to the future of that community. That is what impressed me most: not the building, but its symbolic statement of understanding and respect for education.
My thoughts then turned to our nation in comparison. I have become increasingly concerned that education is not held in as high regard today as it once was here in the United States. Unfortunately, there seems to be a growing disdain for the educated life. That is a dangerous trend for our social and economic well-being and especially so for the future of democracy.
“The dumbing down of this democracy has been gradual, and then — this year — all at once,” author Timothy Eagan writes, “The Princeton Review found that the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were engaged at roughly a high school senior level. A century later, the presidential debate of 1960 was a notch below, at a 10th grade level. By the year 2000, the two contenders were speaking like sixth-graders. And in the upcoming debates — ‘Crooked Hillary’ against ‘Don the Con’ — we’ll be lucky to get beyond preschool potty talk.”
Thomas Jefferson was not alone in his understanding of the importance of education. Many of our founding mothers and fathers emphasized that without an education, democracy cannot be sustained. Last week, Gov. Charlie Baker hosted the annual meeting of New England and Canada’s eastern provinces governors. I do hope that education was on the agenda.
To all of the teachers, taxpayers and policymakers in all of the schools of this community, in our public schools, private schools, charter schools and home schools, those in classrooms and those in offices, from early childhood through higher education, not only do you change individual lives for the better, making families stronger for generations to come and building the future of our community — most significantly and truly most important is that each of you are strengthening our democracy and maybe even saving this nation, one student at a time.
Thank you all for all that you do. Have a wonderful year!
Bob Pura is president of Greenfield Community College.