My Dream About Kids: A Challenge to Boomers

Last night I had a dream about kids. It was so weird, so unusual, that it stuck in my mind as if real.

I was at some sort of town-hall meeting in a huge cafeteria. Sitting at a formica table, I was holding forth on the subject of children and their education. I stressed how important it is that all kids have the best possible education—one that brings out their natural talents and then some. I noted how vital is early-childhood education, including pre-K. That’s what develops kids’ brains for their entire lifetimes.

Finally, I urged providing the best possible education to all of our kids, because that’s what will determine our collective future. We must have good schools, with excellent teachers, whom we pay well, because teachers will fix our species’ fate.

A positive home environment matters, too. But no society, by collective action, can insure that. Only teachers trained for the job can remediate a poor home environment or enhance a good one. Only they can give all kids have the knowledge, skills and moral compasses they will need to find their ways as adults.

In my dream, it was a simple speech, and I tried to keep it so. I consciously used simple words and kept my sentences short. I got embarrassed, in the dream, for using the word “professors,” instead of “teachers,” just because that’s what I had been.

When I had finished, there was a short pause. Then the whole huge room broke into applause. The applause went on so long that it embarrassed me in the dream.

When I awoke, I felt surprised. Like most of us, I rarely have dreams of triumph. Most of my dreams reflect fears, anxieties, inadequacies, and barely repressed dread. But as I woke up fully, I realized that this dream wasn’t really about me. It was about hope.

I’m a Baby Boomer. Actually, I’m a bit of a Pre-Baby-Boomer, born in 1945, not 1946. So I’m an honorary part of the best-educated, safest, richest, best-fed, healthiest, most comfortable, and most selfish generation in human history.

Today I see how quickly the rational, comfortable, safe world that we Boomers inherited is falling apart. Among many other things, the excellent and virtually free education that I got—from kindergarten through my Ph.D.—has become a thing of the past.

Precisely how we recover that halcyon past is beyond my pay grade. But we must.

Today, our entire species faces multiple existential threats. They include: (1) runaway global warming, (2) nuclear war; (3) rising fascism; and (4) the simple inability of our leaders and voters to focus on the things that matter most. We fight like kids among ourselves, over stupid buzzwords like “wokeness,” while the world burns.

As we face these multiple threats, the mood in our nation is nothing like the calm confidence that we Boomers felt in the postwar period, despite the Cold War’s menace. Watch JFK’s “Ask Not” inaugural address, or his “Let’s Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University, and you’ll get an idea of what I mean. (If you’re in a hurry, you can read the transcripts here and here, but they won’t convey the same feelings of hope and confidence.)

Recovering that hope, calm and confidence will be the work of kids born this year, and last year, and next year. So will facing our common threats with determination, science and common sense, not blame and conspiracy theories.

Good education is the key to our nation’s and humanity’s future. It’s as vital to survival as a strong defense, clean air, clean water, and mRNA vaccines against pandemics.

That’s why, though I have no kids of my own, I have never voted against a bond issue or a tax hike for schools or schooling. I never will. Educating all kids well, for me, is the primary obligation of every progressive, especially us Boomers. If we let our kids degenerate to the level of Lord of the Flies—as some adult members of Congress have already degenerated—our nation will be lost, and maybe our species.

Collectively, we Boomers have enjoyed the best lives of any single generation in human history. In my mind, that creates an obligation to all our kids and to the rest of humanity: to give every child a good chance at the same good life. That means, at a minimum, a fine, free education, beginning at age three.

It also means not calling each other names, not pointing fingers, but acting like what we Boomers are: privileged geezers who have had the best educations and best lives in human history. We owe it to our nation and our progeny to make that progress a tradition.


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