In the world of sports, they are immeasurably valuable. Every championship team’s got ‘em.
Glue guys.
You know, players who aren’t superstars, who don’t fill stat sheets, who don’t get featured on the highlight reels. Players who put their egos aside and do the little things, the dirty work, sacrificing for the good of the team. They’re the ones who hold teams together in largely unnoticed ways and make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Healthy societies need that glue too. But with societies, it takes the form of institutions, not players. Three of the most important are schools, post offices and libraries.
What today are called public schools originally were known as common schools. Central to the mission of common schools was basic education for citizenship, a public investment in the capacity for self-government. In 1911 Wisconsin went so far as to identify schools as “social centers” where not just students but anyone in the community could gather to discuss the issues of …
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