I’ve lived a full life, but I think the part of it that I enjoyed most and probably did best was the years when I was a public-school teacher. With the beginning of the school year, I’m reminded of my time in the classroom and the many young people who were such an inextricable part of my life.
I’m now particularly reminded of my time teaching government. While I taught at Bigfork, Whitefish and Kalispell high schools my strongest memories of teaching government were my first years at Bigfork.
It was in the late ‘70s and most of the ‘80s. My classes were relatively small and made up largely of rosy-cheeked Scandinavian farm kids. I met with some success as a university debater, so I was immediately charged with beginning Bigfork’s first speech and debate team. My students brought home the class ABC sweepstakes trophy from the Butte invitational meet that September. Wow! I was hooked and so were the students.
The “Reagan Revolution” was going on in government early in my teaching career, and it was a time of exciting optimism. The nation, including young people, felt it, I think. It was a great time to be a government teacher.
Government teachers then, as now, stress the importance of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government and how they interact so that each can check the others.
I illustrated that the two major political parties check each other as well. I used, as an example, an automobile. To be useful it must be able to start and stop, and speed up and slow down. When the people want to speed the rate of change, they elect the most progressive party to drive the car. When they think there is too much change, especially expensive and intrusive change, they send in the conservatives to slow down and “get a handle” on government.
As I know many teachers still do, I involved students in simulations. In one, each student had to choose a state and be its Senator. Their task was to balance the federal budget. This required researching their state and learning about its economy and people. Senators looking out for the well-being of their states needed to develop some understanding of what government reductions could be tolerable, and which could be ruinous to the state economy and harm its people. Cuts in farm subsidies could be disastrous to grain producing states. But reduced defense spending could be just as ruinous to states with major military installations or factories producing weaponry.
Invariably, the students learned how to build coalitions to protect their own states’ interests and still cut spending. As you can probably imagine, the result of the simulation was often deadlock. The lesson learned was that cutting government spending in a democracy where all interests are represented is far easier said than done.
That always led to discussions of how compromise and the sharing of burdens is necessary for a country by and for the people to ultimately endure and prosper.
Students could teach those lessons of compromise and consensus building to our current political leaders. Rather than a system of “I win; you lose,” my students saw that complex problems require respectful compromise by all if the greater good is to prevail. Costs, just as benefits, must be shared.
Today’s students of civics and government continue to learn the importance of the balancing of powers among the three branches of government – in spite of what they now see happening to erode constitutionally established checks and balances.
Today’s students continue to model their understanding of the importance of respect for those who hold positions different from their own – despite the way they see too many adults resort to name-calling and condemnations of their opponents.
And students today continue to show us that the common good can only be served if the governing parties are willing to find common ground and compromise – even though today’s prominent leaders offer them few examples of such behavior.
As a former government teacher, I know that it is only if our current leaders take a lesson on civility, compromise, and the Constitution, that the common good in this democratic republic can prosper. It now appears sadly clear, that that lesson can only come from the next generation.
Bob Brown is a former Montana Republican Secretary of State and state Senate President. He lives in Whitefish.