Looking back on Hooper Bay

The cloud cover lay close to the ground and the rain still fell on the flat and windswept Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan flew away back to civilization this summer. It would have been easy for someone from urban America to take home a view of this part of the world as a dreary wasteland.

There is no way of knowing, of course, what memories Duncan retains of his tour of the village of Hooper Bay out there on the edge of the Bering Sea. I'd call him and ask, but even if I could get through all the handlers to talk to the man himself, I'm sure his answer about what he learned this summer would only be a bunch of platitudes about how every child in America deserves a first-class education, and how the Obama administration is committed to providing that.

And every child in America does deserve a first-rate eduction.

Without education there isn't much hope of getting ahead in the techno-competitive world of today, and hope is the key to individual survival. That part of the equation hasn't changed in the history of mankind. Everything else might be different, but what keeps us all hanging on through the tough times is the hope that tomorrow will be better than today, or at least no worse.

The big problem facing people, especially young people, in rural Alaska these days is that it's hard to tell what hope should look like. As Duncan and a gang of Obama administration secretaries toured the Delta this summer, the unasked questions that hung in the air over the windy flat lands were these:

-- What good is this modern education?

-- What real help are all these federal handouts?

Almost everywhere you go in rural Alaska, there is a realization that what people need is not handouts, but a hand up. Give a man a check, and he will fritter it away. Give a man a job, and he will make a life for himself.

That rule, by the way, applies to most of us in the 49th state. Those Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend checks we get every year don't create their own, unique Alaska stimulus program because everyone puts the money in a savings account. It's a pretty obvious phenomenon that most Alaskans, when given handouts from the government, run out and spend the money. It's human nature.

And for most Alaskans that's fine. Most have jobs that keep them behaving responsibly most of the time. Imagine what it would be like if they didn't have jobs, if all they got was a government check every month?

For many in rural Alaska, this is the way life is. Will education help?

As the visiting secretaries from far-off Washington, D.C. toured the attractive, 74,000-square-foot, $30 million school in Hooper Bay, it was hard to avoid wondering about this. The school is far and away the nicest building in the village along the barren Bering Sea coast. Built on pilings, it rises above the surrounding tundra like a monument to the can-do attitude of Americans. Inside the building, there is a clean and spacious gym and auditorium, an understocked library and a variety of neat and tidy classrooms, where it appears that dedicated, concerned and interested teachers are doing their best to educate their charges.

Outwardly at least, the system here is doing everything possible to help students succeed, but it's hard to avoid deep and troubling thoughts about what waits at the end of the process. If government pours in enough resources, and if parents and children are willing to work with teachers to produce the best-educated high school graduates in the country, what then?

There are almost no jobs in Hooper Bay. Most of the few there are do not offer a lot of intellectual stimulation. Subsistence hunting and fishing, thanks to the 21st century convenience of gas-powered all-terrain vehicles and snowmachines, have become more like recreational activities than what the ancestors of the people now living at Hooper Bay knew as a grueling, time-consuming lifestyle.