Remarks of Dr. Jerome Segal, candidate for Governor of Maryland in the Democratic primary, to the Maryland State Education Association, April 2, 2022.

“ If I become the next Governor of Maryland, Maryland with have as Governor, for better or worse, someone with a doctorate in Philosophy, who taught Philosophy of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. 

I’m going to say today, some very harsh things, about the Blueprint, the Kirwan commission report. 

Let me get to the bottom line. The Blueprint is a complex document. It has two very distinct dimensions 1) social justice,  and,  2) education itself (or it you will, the mission of the schools). With respect to the first, be it the formula for distributing money, the amount of money, free pre-k, community relations, special needs, school improvement – it is a terrific plan, the gold standard for America.  In its second dimension, education itself, in its aspiration for a world class school system, its methodology, its values, its lack of analysis, it’s astonishing narrowness, its misunderstanding of the future of work in the United States, its narrow vision of the mission of schools, its focus on standardized testing, its instrumentalism and worse of all, its plan for an Accountability Board to enforce this cramped vision, it is: all out, the most impoverish and inadequate document on excellence in education every prepared by a public commission. 

If Governor, I will totally commit to the Social Justice dimension, but at the same time I will make my number one priority blocking implementation of that part of the Blueprint that deals with matters of education, whether through the powers of the Governor or through new legislation. 

What should be the mission of public schools?

Every society faces that question. And the answers given in Nazi Germany were far differently than those in Israel. And the answer for Israel, may not be the same as the answer, even the correct answer, for the United States. 

For the United States then, what is our touchstone for that question?  

It might be our philosophy that government exists to promote and protect our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So, the mission of public schools might be thought of in these terms.  

What then are these missions, missions in plural: 

Life – This might involve a mission related to conflict, to staying alive as a child, to the health of the child, and to avoiding the potential causes of child death, whether from suicide or from homicide. And being super careful that school promote the mental health of children rather than makes them anxious and bewildered and isolated and defeated and hopeless. And teaching conflict de-escalation and using reasoning to resolve dispute rather than force. 

Liberty – Here all that allows democracy to flourish. The ability to articulate grievances, the ability to listen to each other, the nurturing of an underlying respect for each other, the commitment to telling and learning the truth as we seek to reach democratic decisions, the virtues that allow us to count votes fairly, and to stand up to those who would try to destroy our democratic institutions, and a commitment to learning our own history so we can better understand who we are and the terrible mistakes we have made and learn from them and right the wrongs we can. 

And then there is the pursuit of happiness. How are schools to better equip youths to  pursue their own happiness?  

For some, the answer is that the school’s role is to equipping students to succeed  in getting a good job once you leave school. This, indeed, is the underlying, utterly impoverished, view of the Kirwan commission. It is what lies behind the primacy of the Career and College Readiness Standard that the Accountability Board is ultimately to enforce on the entire schooling system. 

Our view is that happiness, and even the future of work life in America will center on shrinking our involvement in the Job System. Our central point of reference is the difference between instrumental work in the job system, work you would not do without pay, and passion work, work and activity so deeply your own, so intimately tied to any deep conception of happiness, that you would do it for free if you didn’t need the money.  We seek in our policies with respect to Transportation and Housing and Medical Care, to reduce the amount of time, reduce the numbers of hours a week we must do Job System work in order to meet our core economic needs. This reduction in the cost of meeting basic needs, coupled with higher minimum wages, and fuller earned income tax credits and child credits, and a legal right to basic employment, (a 4-day 32-hour week of paid employment) will gradually shrink Job system worktime to 4 days a week, then 3 and ultimately 2.  

This we believe, is not only the desirable future, but our actual future as we restore Time to the social agenda and opt for more time and more meaning and less stuff in our lives.  So, from that perspective, what is the mission of the schools in relation to the pursuit of happiness? 

First of all, it must not be purely instrumental. The happiness of children pre-K through high school, matters.

There is a Right to a Childhood that needs to be protected and fulfilled. Schools that are not in themselves joyous, are failing. Schools that children do not wish to be in, are failing. Teachers that cannot enrich the actual experience of the children in their classroom are failing.  School that traumatize are failing. School systems that promote anxiety and overburden the family are failing. 

Secondly, as educators we know that some of the deepest forms of human happiness are only opened to us through education. The mission of the schools is not to entertain the children, it is to help them to develop the depth that will allow them to appreciate the staggering wealth of the cultural inheritance that all the prior years of human civilization has gifted to us. Children do not enter schools with a love of poetry, or an appreciation of a Greek urn or a Persian relief, of a Mozart composition, or of the beauty of Mathematics, or the wonders of biology and astronomy. 

Third the mission of the schools is to enable us to be able to contribute to the richness and happiness  of those around us. No one should leave the public schooling system without, in some dimension, having developed the ability to contribute to the beauty of the world, and to the happiness of others. 

Fourth, schools in enabling the pursuit of happiness  must open students to the intense pleasure of reading a good novel, of retreating from the fast-paced world they live in, whether by going to the couch or under a tree, and reading just for the pure pleasure of it. If just one student leaves school without a love of books, we have not done our job properly. Schools must equip children for the joys of simple living, so they instinctively make their career choices by opting for more time and meaning rather than more money and more stuff. 

In truth, I could go on for weeks. I have written a book on this, it is called “Graceful Simplicity; The Philosophy and Politics of Simple Living” and it is out of this that Bread and Roses humanism or Bread and Roses socialism, whatever you wish to call it, has emerged. And it is out of that, that if elected, I will do my part as Governor of Maryland.