The summer of 2009 will sadly be remembered in California for more than the untimely death of Michael Jackson or the celebratory triumph of the Los Angeles Lakers. For California educators, these summer months are truly dog days because, as the next school year beckons in the weeks to come, many of us are having the same radical and tragic realization.

My concern is not so much for the current generation of California students, who will remember both good and bad times. My summertime angst, instead, centers on the certainty that the next generation of California students will experience a form and quality of education that will be profoundly inferior to those that have come before.

As the current budget crisis worsens without end – and its attendant funding cuts, teacher layoffs and program exorcisms – a sinister but palpable collusion of forces have been unleashed that will undermine not just next year's students but an entire generation of California pupils and educators.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I admit that I teach political science at a public high school and at a state university. But my interest and concern go far beyond my profession and paycheck. I have two young daughters who will spend the next decade of their lives sitting in public school classrooms. The current budget crisis will darken the prospects of not just the next few years of California education but, unluckily for me, the entire public school career of my children.

Consider the following realities: larger class sizes, lower teacher pay and the elimination of countless artistic and athletic opportunities. On the horizon, quality teachers will retire earlier. Talented young people who once considered teaching for a career will logically search for other professional outlets or go to other states. Teacher morale for those in the midst of their career is at an all-time low. A spirit of inventiveness and creativity that once permeated the California classroom has, in recent years, been eviscerated by a misguided and monomaniacal obsession to standardize every facet of the educational experience, from curriculum and methodology to testing and pacing.

But read beyond the headlines and the news gets much worse.

Statesmen from Pericles to Jefferson understood that the laboratory of democracy is the classroom. A democratic mind is an eclectic mind, a mind that is free to experience the full spectrum of human possibilities, and to color and shade the future with the wisdom of such experience. The school is supposed to be a portal to such possibilities.

Athletics engender certain habits of the mind – discipline, competition, teamwork – that later serve as the foundational virtues of the political community and commercial marketplace.

The fine arts empower young people to embrace an ethos of creativity and encourage forms of individual expression that serve to improve and inform the national conversation of the next generation.

Academic pursuits, from the sciences to the humanities, are the engines of civilization and the fuel of progress. The genius of American education has always been that a well-rounded and eclectic mind – a mind that has been exposed to more than rote memorization and regurgitation – is a mind that is capable of fulfilling the duties of American citizenship. An eclectic mind is cultivated not just in the classroom but on the playing field and on the stage, while playing an instrument or partaking in a class debate.

It is not just funding at stake, but the possibilities of creating a thoughtful and civil society.

The current crisis is disconcerting because it creates a gulf between the teachers we are and the teachers many of us entered the classroom to be. Good teaching should raise the pulse of the students involved. Good teaching has the potential to enlarge and enrich a student's perspective by rendering the cynical hopeful and the ignorant educated. There is no question that we educators (teachers, coaches and counselors alike) long for the time when we can become more than automatons of standards and practitioners of test-taking; we long for that moment that unites us in our conviction that educators are not merely conveyers of impersonal curriculum but, in those all-too-rare moments of pedagogic enchantment, artists of human transformation.

But this transformation requires both financial and human resources. The fact that such idyllic outcomes will be harder to produce for the next generation of students is neither an accusation nor a lamentation, merely a cold, unfortunate reality.

Walt Whitman once wrote: "Produce great Persons, the rest follows." Our charge as educators is nothing less than training the next generation of Americans to use their minds to better themselves and their civilization. Our fidelity to this ideal will never waiver.

But the dreary reality is this: It will be tougher to achieve this civic wisdom in the years ahead, and no number of Sacramento IOUs will ever change it.