I am helping to sponsor several people through their school experience in Mexico and here. This year I had the pleasure of seeing a granddaughter graduate as a Chemical Engineer and go on to Houston, Texas to work with a corporate team.
I have another granddaughter beginning her university experience and occupies a lot of my effort to help. In Mexico, I am helping to support a young lady who is the first in her family to go to college and who is less than a year away from graduating in Social Work, a profession that is in high demand in her country.
I am also very excited to help a little boy from the same Mexican family enter the first grade. Before his first day of attendance, we needed to buy his uniform with the school colors, a pair of shoes, a backpack, pencils, paper and other things that a little person needs. I am taken with the fact that the uniform includes a tie with the shirt.
The ebullience of the little boy reminds me of my first day in a rural elementary school in central Texas. I remember getting off the bus and running home as fast as I could with a tattered pre-primer booklet to the basic reader Fun with Dick and Jane.
In our family, the early days of excitement turned to the grind of work in the migrant fields that competed with school to such an extent that eventually every year we entered classes a month late in the fall and left a month early in the spring. In a way, it was a God-sent to come to Colorado and settle.
Here, the practice of the love of education was no longer a luxury but an extensive menu of opportunities to go to class for a full year, play sports, socialize with other students and grow as a part of a community beyond family. Many other members of our extended clan also had similar opportunities and found their footing in their educational experience.
The family scattered throughout the country as many like us in Colorado stopped migrating and settled where we had arrived. This led to a desire to come together in some form and in that spirit organized family reunions every two years beginning in the early 1980s.
Through the reunions one can trace the economic and educational development of the family. What started out as migrant workers and farmers that converted to workers in small and large cities over the years, became successful business owners, industry professionals and academics.
The secret to this success was an educational agenda that has produced leaders in many fields. For example, the last family reunion in Dallas, Texas was hosted by a cousin who is the Dean of the College of Education at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
Education has not only been the vehicle by which the family moved out of poverty but also nurtured a love of learning and respect for those that have achieved goals in the social and economic world. Although the households are diversified in their philosophy of living in our complex country, they have maintained the notion that “education is the light of the world.”
Honoring the first day of school at all levels celebrates children, young people and adults’ commitment to learning and its power to transform our lives. Going back to school is an act of faith in that value.
Let us encourage our children to do their best. Their future depends on it.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of LaVozColorado. Comments and responses may be directed to News@lavozcolorado.com.
