BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY, NOV. 6, 2017) — Going back to our grammar school days, THE PLANET has long loved education and learning. This includes the self-taught and acquired kind, which — if you think about it — is the only kind of authentic learning.

Our formal academic background consists of nine years of private grammar school, one year at a private high school, three years at a public high school, two and a half years at a public college, two and a half years at a private college, and two years at a private university, graduate school. It totals three diplomas, one certification, and three college degrees: 14.5 years privately taught, 5.5 years in the public way. We have learned that education is the way up and out, a message we have passionately preached, pushed, and proselytized in hundreds of college courses to thousands of students going back to fall semester, 1977, at LeMoyne College.

There, this newly minted adjunct professor of English barely older than his students faced a senior-level classroom of men and women taking our course in expository writing. Today, these many years later, The Ol’ Professor still loves entering a classroom, eager, excited, and enthused at the opportunity of helping to ignite a spark that will foster an explosion that leads to a realization, namely, that education and learning provide the fuel to the most satisfying journey of life, that of self-actualization, a main component of which is to understand that “happiness” and “success” are but inaccurate synonyms for the much-more attainable human state of “fulfillment.”

“Happiness” comes only as occasional oases in the journey through life and its “veil of tears.” As for “success,” it, like “failure,” can only be self-defined, individual visions that can be seen only in the most sacred, sacrosanct level of honesty — you know, the inner stuff we tell ourselves at night when we look in the mirror after the long day, when the masks come off and the bullspitting stops. Fullfillment, on the other hand, resides uniformly in one’s persona (“soul,” if you will) with no need of definition. When you are fulfilled, you know it. You live gratefully and die with no regrets.

Education provides the surest ticket to Fullfillment. The Greeks knew this when they gave their understanding of “happiness.” They thought that a “happy” life comes from the pursuit of one’s talents, fully, along the lines of excellence. No holding back, no self-limitations, no excuses or rationales. In fact, the word “education” itself provides a clue. It is a word derived from the Latin prefix “ex” (“out of”) and the term “ducas”  (“to lead”). Education is the process of leading someone out of ignorance, out of the linguistic and intellectual ghettoes that separate, divide, and exclude people.

THE PLANET shares these observations after reading a recent editorial by Jonathan Levine in The Pittsfield Gazette. Levine wrote this about the most recent MCAS results for the Pittsfield School District. The words are worth sharing. We hope they sear their way into the minds of every public official in the city:

“Sugarcoating can’t obscure the shockingly grim standardized test scores this week by school officials.

“Pittsfield’s MCAS results are downright cataclysmic. In eighth grade English, not a single [student citywide] was classified as ‘exceeding expectations.’ The results for other grades and subjects were only marginally better.

“To put it in more familiar terms, Pittsfield kids as a whole earned an “F” on the 2017 MCAS exams.”

Do we have to draw you a map? If you’re the mayor, a city councilor, or a member of the school committee, the answer is evidently “yes.” They, too, have failed — colossally and expensively. Over the past decade, taxpayers have funded these dismal results to the financial tune of ONE BILLION DOLLARS.

$1,000,000,000.

Think about it if you vote tomorrow.

Elect NONE OF THE ABOVE. Better yet, do your civic duty by NOT voting. Casting a ballot — other than writing in NOTA or a protest name such as Walter A. White, Jimmy McGill, or Dan Valenti — only makes you complicit in a sickening crime.

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“Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl” — Marty Robbins, “El Paso.”

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.

LOVE TO ALL.

The Usual Disclaimer.