Geat Writers; The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy

“I am not here tonight for the love of the school board.  I have been on the island and have seen the conditions there.  You have been presiding over an educational desert.  Children who grow up on that island don’t have a prayer of receiving an adequate education.  They grow up without hope.  They drift into the big cities of the East Coast and not in some tenement slum—without hope.  They are not taught to read, to write to speak, or to be proud of themselves or their race.  Their parents are not influential, literate, or vocal, so this educational system is perpetuated.  If these parents were white and important, their school would be as fine a school in the country.  If their parents were white, the question of a gas bill and maintenance bill would never come up—even if I were driving a battleship to work.  But the school is black.  The people on the island are black, And, my God, the hopelessness of teaching in a black society, cut off from society by water, is an agony few people have experienced.  Yamacraw requites sweeping reform of your thinking.  It demands for a brief moment that you forget about money and budgets and balanced books.  Forget about your building plans, ordering new volleyballs for the high school and how many tractors to purchase next year.  Think instead about children.  People. Human beings.  Feel for once that education is about people—not figures.”  (265)

58 pages; 23,774 words, visuals