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According to the authorities, today is not merely
Groundhog Day, but also Shadow Day,
when youngsters
are supposed to acquire useful career knowledge by
following some employed adult around all day.
Before we get to the shadows, we should pay homage to the day and its namesake groundhog, which is a large rodent that lives in Colorado under a different name.
The history of Groundhog Day is not clear, even in one
of my favorite reference books, Brewer's Dictionary of
Phrase and Fable.
It may have started with a Roman
custom of lighting candles to scare away evil spirits in
the winter. The Roman Catholic Church, as it expanded into
Europe during the first millennium, often assigned
liturgical significance to existing pagan festivals --
Easter even retains the name of a Teutonic springtime
celebration.
Thus the Roman candle ritual could have become became Candlemas Day on Feb. 2, when all the candles a church would need in the coming year were consecrated.
Then there's an old German proverb: The badger peeps
out of his hole on Candlemas Day, and, if he finds snow,
walks abroad; but if he sees the sun shining he draws back
into his hole.
How did that ancient badger turn into the modern groundhog? The reference books are silent, though they note that sometimes the emerging critter of lore was a bear.
If some Colorado chamber of commerce were as aggressive as that in Punxsutawney, Pa., we could celebrate Groundhog Day here -- a groundhog (a/k/a woodchuck, whistle pig or rockchuck) is any of eight species of marmot, and the yellow-bellied marmot is a common sight on summer strolls in our high country.
But the critters are not common on Feb. 2, at least out where you might see one checking her shadow. They spend about half their lives in hibernation, and do not emerge until mid-April, at the earliest. Obviously, the best way to honor Groundhog Day in Colorado is to sleep in, and upon rousing at noon, go back to bed.
However, we've got this Shadow Day,
and if you
honored Groundhog Day properly, you'd be setting a terrible
example for your youthful shadow.
Shadow Day seems to be an outgrowth of the latest educational fad, School-to-Work, which is one of the dumbest notions I've ever encountered, even in American education, which abounds with stupid ideas and pretentious people to promote and implement them until next panacea comes along.
For starters, the whole notion of career
education
is a betrayal of the ideals behind our public
schools.
Consider the writings of one of the first American advocates of public education, Thomas Jefferson. He envisioned a literate population so that Americans could be active citizens of a republic, able to follow public affairs and to instruct their representatives.
Granted, some people these days feel compelled to shield
their children from the great affairs of state in
Washington, rather than expose young minds to the
intricacies of what is
means, but Jefferson's
concept still seems valid.
The second problem with school-to-work
is that it
replaces a public agenda with a corporate agenda; instead
of training citizens for a republic, we use public funds to
develop good worker bees. Inevitably, some businesses will
be subsidized at the expense of others, and who's to say
whether the favored business will be there when the kids
graduate? How valuable is it in Leadville to know how run
a jackleg drill, now that its last mine has closed?
The third problem: Outside of the licensed professions, few people do what they were educated to do. The only person I know in Salida with a journalism degree is the town handyman. Our town librarian was educated as a chemist. One of my brothers, trained as a diesel mechanic, designs and sells computerized controls for industrial laundries.
When I talk to employers, they tell me they want people who knew how to gather information quickly, organize it coherently and express it clearly -- that is, liberal-arts generalists.
If people can do that, they can pick up the rest on the job. The specific machinery doesn't matter much -- most of the stuff we employ routinely now (from compact disks to e-mail) didn't even exist when I was in school. Why spend scarce public dollars to create expertise that will be obsolete -- seen any job openings for those punch-tape-reader fixers who were indispensable when I started working at newspapers?
Instead of Shadow Day, maybe some schoolroom in Colorado should celebrate Groundhog Day with another of those youthful lobbying projects that gave us a state fossil and a state butterfly.
The kids could agitate for an Official State Rodent, the
legislature could devote its attention to this vital issue,
and if we were lucky, nobody would have any time left for
promoting this school to work
nonsense.
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