I lasted about 20 minutes at a recent meeting at which the Massachusetts Department of Education sought “input from the general public” about what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from Massachusetts high schools.

Certainly, it is good to rethink what we mean by the word "education," and to test whether the system works.

    But I had to ask myself this: If the govern­ment were not involved, if cost were not an issue, what could education be? If no limits are assumed and no bias involved, what can education be?

 Most participants had an agenda

    Democracy is a fair system, but is it any less inappropriate for the Department of Education to decide what students should know than it would be for the Agriculture Department to require you to eat certain things?

I did run into some real people during my short stay at the public hearing at the Greater Lowell Regional Vocational Technical School. But the participants were mostly professional educators, former teachers and others with an agenda. They were lobbying for more money, a greater role for a particular department and the necessity of teaching morality to kids. One speaker even wanted all children to know Latin.

A woman in the audience said students should learn skills that would help them compete for America in the international market­place.

Is this what education should be, a training ground for industry? If so, then let industry pay.

What would happen if we tried a different process? What if we put aside the interests of industry, teachers, the church, pro-abortion and anti-choice advocates and any other special interests and ponder these questions:

• How can education help children to know themselves, to be happy, intelligent and free from the conditioning and influences of television, propaganda and peer pressure?

• Can an educational system run and financed by the government be reformed through hearings which the same government has ordained?

• Can the process rise above the nature of politics, i.e., the propensity to settle for compromise rather than to seek actual reform?

In Letters to the Schools, the philosopher and educator Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote that the function of a school is " . . . to help the student to awaken his intelligence.”

The Communists tried to control the content of education in the former Soviet Union, and we see in the collapse of that empire how dogma and nationalistic fervor in schools created a power base for the establishment, but added little to the advancement of intelligence.

Can we rely on politics to bring the most radical of all educational reform — that which would have as its goal the well-being of the child rather than the retention of our own values and opinions through the curriculum in state-run schools?

Michael Gallagher, a member of both the local school committee and the state common core commission, argues that the Board of Education can ignore public comment in favor of its own recommendations. But isn’t it the same Board whose failure to date is why the hearings are being held in the first place?

Can we give up content control?

Let’s ask ourselves this: Are schools under the control of the Board turning out healthy, happy, intellectually stimulated and creative graduates with a sense of the responsibility their freedom carries? Or are we seeing more gang members, dropouts, teen-age suicides, and neurotic teens beaten down by a grading system that pits students against one another.

Can the state prevent that, even if we ask it to do so in the public hearings?

Can adults who finance public education give up control of its content so that the next generation will not be extensions of ourselves?

Can education in the United States, in Mas­sachusetts, in Lowell, provide the setting, the tools, the relationship between children and teachers, and the psychological security in each child so that their intelligence awakens, re­gardless of the curriculum?

This is what I want for my child. 

How about you?

Geoff Davidian wrote this in 1994 for the Lowell Sun. His son attended the Krishnamurti Educational Centre at Brockwood Park, England.