“The real test of any teaching is: Does it strengthen a man to bear the burdens of life, and to walk the way wherein he ought to go.
William Barclay, “Daily Study Bible”
In and out of school, an examined life is the truest education a person will obtain. If we reflect on our choices and their intended and unintended consequences, we might end our lives wiser than we began. If we assiduously strive to understand the whys of our experiences, we might even leave the world the better for our having lived in it. As Socrates once said, “An unexamined life is not worth living”.
A person striving to both be and do good will never cease trying to learn worthwhile lessons from the choices and circumstances that they have witnessed. Diligence in service to making some sense out of the catalogue of our experiences always adds depth to our awareness of both the true natures of human beings and of the wider world.
From our infancy to our dotage, we are given opportunities to discover the meaning of our lives. Early on, it is natural for children to exhibit insatiable curiosity about such matters. Unless we are each careful to shepherd our capacity for wonder, we risk losing that spark that makes the world come alive. Skepticism can too easily become cynicism. Exhilaration easily becomes tedium.
Most important in any teaching is the subtext that life is worth living and that the wonders of creation never cease. Great teachers inspire curiosity, cultivate wonder, and build the sinews of hope and courage in the minds and hearts of any student entrusted to their care.
To do this, Teachers must be both scrupulously honest and fully present in every moment spent with students. It is not methodology that excites young people, but rather the opportunity to learn worthwhile lessons from a trusted adult who has authentically legitimate life lessons to teach.
For me, my vocation is to aspire to be and do all of these things in hopes of earning the trust of my students and their families. Since I work with teenagers, this cannot be merely an exercise in solemnity. A certain irreverent humor, an eagerness to find the inevitable ironic contradictions in the dramas of human history, is necessary to appeal to the innately sarcastic curiosity of most teens.
All of this is an art, not a science. Either a person is born with the potential to be a compelling Teacher, or they are not. Such a spark is akin to the fire inside any performer. Because we Teachers are performers engaged daily in improvisational storytelling, an irrepressible internal dynamism is every bit as important to us as it is to singers, actors, and stand-up comedians.
My own vocation is to compellingly teach the history of our shared Western Civilization. I am fortunate enough to get to explore how the definition of a fully-enfranchised human being expanded from a solitary Egyptian God-King and a few oligarchical Mesopotamian Astrologer Priests to now include every single human being.
I have the opportunity to consider the development of freedom and the rule of law from Hammurabi’s Code and the Decalogue through Democratic Athens and Republican Rome, from Christendom and Magna Carta through the U. S. Constitution and the maturing American Republic. I am privileged to examine just how we went from cave paintings to moon landings, from the first guttural spoken words, to Gutenberg’s Press, to the World Wide Web.
In this mission, I endeavor to be true to the past, to the character of my students, and to my own vision and talents. Because of the inescapable variabilities in the second and third truths, no one will ever teach the stories of the West as I do, and each year I will teach like never before or since.
I have been fortunate enough to work in schools with wise and empowered building Principals who understand these matters as I have explained them above. Consequently, I have been one of many Teachers able to pursue excellence without undue references to the sexy educational jargon of the moment. Because I have the scope to be my personal best, rather than the product of some expert’s pet philosophy, my students have benefitted. So have the students of other empowered Teachers and school Principals.
Does any of this sound like anything that has come out of our local School Superintendent’s Offices, our local School Boards, or our local Teacher’s Unions? Does anything I have expressed about my decades-long vocation seem to be said in even the same language as the cant of Education Experts?
Of course not! The vast majority of Educational leaders today are products of Education School programs that are a mishmash of Brand-X pseudoscience leavened by outdated psychological theories and Marxist utopianism. Ask most Teachers what their most useless and counterproductive classroom experiences were, and they will almost always say their Teacher Training classes.
Yet, the leadership of the critical mass of America’s schools are people who have become acknowledged experts in this type of pedagogical groupthink. Education Professors, government bureaucrats, private foundations, and District Administrators have together wrought a system of schooling that provides ever-increasing student failures. These very failures justify their jobs as expert leaders and consultants. The needs of both student and society are sacrificed on the altar of the currently fashionable abstract theory.
None of our local School Levies are rooted in anything like a traditional notion of what constitutes good teaching and learning. All of them support bloated District Superintendent Offices staffed with local mandarins who chiefly intrude on the scope that students and Teachers need in order to create engaging and engrossing learning. The flow of outside Grants and Federal monies further constrict creativity where it is most needed, as close to the student as possible. Philosophies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion destroy discipline and undermine excellence.
None of this should be rewarded with one red cent of additional money. Our educational leadership is so deeply entranced by their own visions that they do not even realize how much they have betrayed their trust.
Students deserve better, but this better will only come when the cancerous cult of pedagogical experts have been starved of money and drummed out of authoritative office.
Vote NO on the local school levies, all of them!
