Education's Engine

The first automobile I ever owned wasn't really mine. It was owned by my mother, who surprised me by purchasing it as a clever pre-emptive strike that effectively precluded me from signing papers on the motorcycle I really wanted.

Mothers are like that. Possessing remarkable skills honed over years of travail, they use their wiles to save children from themselves, whether the children like it or not.

The car was a 1932 Plymouth, and during the summer of 1941 it carried me to and from my job at The Aluminum Company of America. It was a great car...and I was so proud.

I sold it just before I began my freshman year at the University of Michigan, and it broke my heart (assuaged a bit because my mother let me keep the money).

I didn't own another automobile until 1949, when my r wife and I moved from New York City to Westport, CT, and bought a four-door 1928 Ford "Model A."

You're too young to know about the Model A, of course, but it was Henry Ford's mass-produced workhorse, a very inexpensive and almost indestructible masterpiece of an automobile, with no frills.

That Model A served us well for three or four years, whether we were driving around town or driving 150 miles to Hampton, NH, to visit my wife's parents.

For those long trips we'd hang kids' bicycles on the back, a playpen across the front, fill the back seat with kids and baggage and then chug out of town.

About every 50 miles we'd stop to let the car cool while I put more water into the radiator. And, on almost every trip something fell off or stopped working. First it was the horn, fastened to the front of the car, which crashed to the pavement and fell apart.

On another trip it was the old-fashioned leaf springs in the front of the car that broke apart and fell to the pavement, piece by piece, as we blithely rolled along. (Our motto: keep rolling until the car stops.)

Four years after we bought our beloved Model A it "threw a rod" (don't ask) and the automobile that cost us $75 was sold to an antique car collector for $100.

Today's cars, I believe, aren't much different from those old ones I loved so dearly. Sure, today's cars have lots of bells and whistles we never had - windshield washers, heaters and air conditioning, for exampie - plus a zillion gadgets and doodads that would have caused my Model A to drool with envy.

But the engineering principle behind the internal combustion engine that drives today's cars is basically the same - better designed and engineered, of course - as it was in my Model A.

In education, teachers are the engines that power our educational system. Without teachers, nothing moves. And, like the improvement in today's automobile engines, today's teachers are reaping rewards from improvements in teacher education and training.

Furthermore, like the automobile with all its bells and whistles, we in education are benefitting from some bells and whistles of our own - from computers, software and the Internet, to marvelous supplementary teaching materials, exciting professional growth opportunities and lots of new classrooms.'

But, just as a car can't move without an engine, education can't move without the all-important engine that takes us from where we are to where we want to be.

That engine, of course, is the teacher.

Allen A. Raymond, Publisher

Copyright Early Years, Inc. Oct 2005
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