When I taught a high school civics seminar at a Harlem charter school, my favorite lesson was one I did near the end of the school year that I hoped my students would never forget. I handed each soon-to-be graduating senior an invoice for the entire cost of their public education.
The invoices were official-looking. Clean design and letterhead, personalized—a bill for the approximate total, over a quarter of a million dollars, that the city and state of New York had spent on each student’s “free” K–12 education. When I passed them out, there was usually a moment of stunned silence. Then someone would inevitably ask, “Wait…is this real?”
“Of course it’s real,” I’d reply. “This is my job. I get paid. So do your other teachers. We’re not volunteers. The heat and electricity are on. Your books aren’t free. Who do you think pays for all this?”
I didn’t want to panic them, so I let them in on the joke fairly quickly. No, the bill isn’t real, I’d explain, launching the lesson. But the cost is absolutely real. The citizens of New York State and New York City had spent nearly three hundred thousand dollars to educate each and every one of them. Why?
They’d rarely if ever reflected on the cost of their “free” public education, much less that strangers— millions of people they’d never meet and who’d never met them—had been quietly investing in them for over a decade. It sparked some of the richest classroom discussion I’ve ever led. What does society owe its young people? What do young people owe society in return?
No one had ever invited them to see school as a gift, as their civic inheritance, as a sign that the world might be for them, not against them.
And that experience convinced me of something at the heart of this talk: Our job isn’t just to teach kids things. It’s to shape what they think the world is like, and whether it’s a world worth engaging in or a world to retreat from. A world that’s on their side, or a world that is aligned against them.