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231 WASHINGTON 39 The Virtues of Public Education Susan L. DeJarnatt Brown had little immediate impact on my own education but has had a profound effect on that of my children. I grew up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest that started its civic life as a lumber company town. It is the home of what during my childhood was the world’s largest pulp mill, operated by Weyerhauser. The founders of the town were Southerners who saw no place for people of color in their mill or in their town. The tiny African American community was unofficially but effectively restricted to a single neighborhood whose children went to the other high school in town. Ironically, that high school also educated most of the children of the managerial class. My classmates were nearly all white and nearly all working class. The only relief from the all-white population was a small community of Hawaiians who were allowed to work at the mill and whose children went to my high school; a handful of Asian Americans; and the one lone African American girl who transferred in halfway through my junior year in high school, who was quiet, shy, and probably miserably lonely. Brown had no immediate impact on this situation because there were so few people of color to begin with. But the civil rights movement made us aware, at least in the abstract , of the impact of segregation in the United States, and the general sense I had was that most of my fellow students thought segregation was wrong and unfair. Certainly that was the value I was raised with at home—that Martin Luther King was a hero, and that Lyndon Johnson’s and Hubert Humphrey’s great accomplishment was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. My parents admired Johnson and Humphrey for their civil rights efforts long after I had become very dismissive of both men because of their role in promoting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. My schools were not very strong academically. They were designed to educate the children of the working class and to prepare them to work at the mill or to marry the men who worked at the mill. The most important students were the football stars and the cheerleaders. It was not an easy place to be an openly smart, college-bound girl. I couldn’t abide the limited goals of most of my classmates and they thought I was peculiar. But I shared the education experience and made friends with kids whose economic circumstances 232 De Facto States and worldviews were very different from mine. Working-class and poor people were real, not some abstract “other.” I learned more about what life is like for most people in the United States in my hometown than I did in the more privileged college environment that I left home for. I learned that because I went to school with a representative cross-section of the community I lived in. No one went to private school, except for some of the Catholic kids who went to Catholic grade school before joining everyone for high school. Some kids dropped out, some got pregnant, some joined the army, some went to college , many went to work at the mill. I didn’t want the limited horizons of that small-town life for my children and I did not want such a racially monotonous environment. But I did value the experience of feeling that the school was reflective of the community whose children it educated, and I wanted that for my children too. I have lived in Philadelphia my entire adult life. I ended up here by chance but the place suits me well. It has the cultural and culinary advantages of a city with new things and new people always to be discovered, and anonymity available if you want it. But it also has a deeply rooted community and is small enough that you can feel a strong sense of connection. And it is not racially monotonous. I have two children, one now in college and one in fourth grade. The older one went to our neighborhood school from kindergarten through eighth grade. She then moved on to an academic magnet public high school that draws students from all over Philadelphia. My kids have shared their education with the children of their community—except for most of the well-off white ones. In elementary school, they have been in the position of being in the...

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