Friday Night Lights and Public Education: A Reflection

I've come to love Friday Night Lights: cheering for my high school football team and (more important, since my daughter's in the band) for the pride of Stillwater, the Pioneer Marching Band.

I love the fact that I am united with a whole bunch of people I don't know in a shared set of rituals, cheering for OUR team, cheering on OUR band, watching the dance/pom squad and the cheer squad show off their competition routines, cheering for all the young people who have accomplished great things in our community and are brought to the crowd's attention during breaks in game play.

You know what wouldn't achieve this kind of community unity, bring people from all over town together from a wide range of different demographics and economic brackets? The football game of the McUppity Private College-Preparatory School.

Conservativism, at its heart, is about valuing traditions and long-standing institutions and being very cautious about upending or damaging them. Our public schools are one such long-standing institution, and so much of our collective life--so much of our culture--has grown up and taken shape in and through our public schools.

At their best, our public schools bring divergent parts of our communities together in the shared project of supporting and education and cheering for our kids. Nothing symbolizes this more than Friday Night Lights, when people from different economic brackets, different political parties, and different faith communities, come together to cheer the community’s kids. 

But there is a growing ideological opposition to our public schools, one that prefers a vision of everyone-for-themselves fragmentation in which public dollars are funneled into private schools instead--schools that by their nature aren't for everyone. "School choice" sounds nice, but private schools aren't required to let everyone in--they can refuse to educate those with special needs or can insist on educating only the gifted and talented or the people who belong to their particular faith tradition, etc. Channeling tax dollars towards these schools means the public schools will shrink and have fewer resources, and this will become a feedback loop: As they become less equipped to educate our kids, more families will choose to send their kids and public tax dollars to a private school. Eventually, the public school will be replaced by private schools for high-performing students and a public remedial school where the students with special needs or challenges are segregated from their peers and have too few resources to succeed. 

One clear cost of this approach is that we will see an increase in inequality in the form of unequal access to the goods of education. But this point aside, were this anti-public-school vision for the future of education to succeed, there would no longer be the community’s school. Instead, there’d be the school of the rich country club set, the school of the Roman Catholic parish, etc. 

None of these private institutions will draw the community together in a version of Friday Night Lights—because none of these belong to the community. 

Of course, those who are critical of the institution of public education don't get up on a debate stage and tell us they aim to bring an end to Friday Night Lights. (In the current state superintendent race, the representative of this anti-public-school ideology hasn't gotten up on the debate stage at all. He was a no-show for the recent agreed-upon debate, perhaps afraid of what truths about him would be exposed.) 

But even if they don’t get up and say it, the gutting of public schools is the gutting of a center of community life in America. In addition to jeopardizing democratic access to quality education, it would hasten the fragmentation of our communities.

This is an element of our public school system that doesn’t get the attention it deserves in our public discussions, even though it is an element we experience directly in all kinds of ways. Maybe we don’t pay attention to it because it is so integral to our lives that we take it for granted. 

We shouldn’t. It is a robust public school system that makes Friday Night Lights possible. The marching band of the college-prep school on the rich end of MyTown won’t be the Pride of MyTown. It’ll be the Pride of the Rich Elites.

The very existence of so many of the valuable things we take for granted have been built up around and depend on long-standing public institutions. This is where the deep truth of conservatism lies: we shouldn’t be cavalier about upending such institutions or gutting our traditions, because it is sometimes hard to see how much of what we value is tied to them and depends on them.

I believe in public education. Its community-building importance, symbolized and embodied in Friday Night Lights, is just one of many reasons. When it comes to public education, I’m a conservative: I believe we should be deeply careful about policy proposals that threaten to undercut support for something that has been such a central part of American life for generations. 

I never discovered Friday Night Lights before moving to Oklahoma, but I'm glad I did. And I hope that it continues to be a part of American culture into the future. Because it is a bastion against community fragmentation. It is a time and place where neighbors and strangers can come together to cheer as a community for the accomplishments of our kids. 

It wouldn't exist without the public school--the community's school, the school that belongs to the community as a whole. But that is part of what makes it so meaningful to me. So often today we think only of ourselves, only own own kids, our own success. Friday Night Lights is the community coming together to celebrate its most important collective project: working together as a team to successfully prepare the next generation.