Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
I. Why Cultivating Awake Minds Matters
Each of us craves a working understanding of the factors which shape our lives. Our human need to know WHY is behind all religions, philosophies, and ideologies. Especially when circumstances become desperate, we pine to comprehend meaning.
It may very well be true that one of our primary functions as human beings is to perceive God’s creation from our myriad individual perspectives. Employing our reason, intuition, creativity, and memory we imagine a model that explains to us our own lived experiences. Part of why we were made in His image may be so that we may each experience existence and try to make some sense of it. The richness of His truth is seasoned by our diverse notions about what it all
may mean.
In a free society like ours, it is doubly important for every one of us to cultivate an understanding about why and how the world operates. These sorts of personal answers inform how we do our civic duty as well as how we vote.
As no one can long live without hope, there is yet one more reason for us to wonder about the big questions: Who is God? What does He want from us? What constitutes a well-lived life? Unless we craft a latticework of meaning which offers us a hope that transcends universal death, we will neither thrive nor fulfill our potential.
All of this indicates why it is so crucially important for each of us to cultivate our own minds and help others to do the same. Happiness, health, productivity, wisdom, strength, sociability, common sense, and social cohesion all derive from a well-cultivated mind.
II. Cause & Effect
Yet our society’s system of public K-12 and university education increasingly fails to cultivate intellectually curious, emotionally balanced, spiritually strong, and
practically self-disciplined young minds. This devolutionary trend has been intensifying over more than a half-century as America’s education systems have been hijacked by political ideologies of control and social psychologies of enablement.
Because of this failure, students and families must exercise great care in choosing where to seek a good education. So very many K-12 schools are run under an ideology of permissible irresponsibility where natural consequences for bad conduct are muted in a cloud of exculpatory psychobabble.
Young people need to develop an understanding of cause and effect in order to learn how their chosen words and actions lead to certain consequences. Yet many who run contemporary schools are so averse to the very idea of punishment that they persistently interfere in the causal relationship between choice and consequence.
Claiming that they are being compassionate, merciful and wise, these apologists steal the reality and opportunity away from young people. Instead of learning how decision leads to outcome, the learning of youth is stunted by the well-meaning good intentions of meddlesome adults.
In reality, there is nothing kind about coddling badly behaved students. “Compassion” condemns the victims of misbehaving students to ongoing chaos and even danger. The education of all is threatened by the indulged anarchy of some.
The badly behaved student is most directly harmed. Under the regime of enablers, spoiled brats and compulsive bullies are shielded from the natural consequences of their actions. Instead of encountering punishments that will help such a socially caustic young person to grow out of their nasty and disruptive ways, they instead become more fully consumed by their worst
impulses. They learn that “might is right” and persist in behaviors that lead to negative results such as unfulfilling relationships, criminal records, and more.
The cultivation of healthy young minds requires that failure be restored as an option. Discipline should be swift, fair, and unpleasant, so that students are motivated to avoid it. Unless adults reclaim control, the most violent and disruptive students inevitably rule the school.
III. The Forgotten Purpose of Schools
Most contemporary educators have been trained to forget that acculturating young people into our shared American variant of Western Civilization is our schools’ primary objective. Universal mandatory public education was first established in the late-19th Century to bring the children of immigrants into the American mainstream.
When schools fail to even attempt to accomplish this mission, in large part because our universities damn the West for its sins as being uniquely unworthy of perpetuation, we contract a form of cultural amnesia. Because young Americans are literally not taught who we Americans are as a distinct people, the population of the United States increasingly forgets or never learns about our shared identity.
Such widespread erasure of any coherent memory of who we are and what we stand for will inevitably render us vulnerable to the communicable mental illnesses of totalitarianism. If, as a people, we no longer identify ourselves with traditional American and Western values, our natural resistance to the seductive blandishments of those who would enslave us evaporates.
The cultivation of healthy young minds requires that everyone in our schools relearns and reaffirms that their primary duty is to acculturate coming generations into our Western Civilization. Everything that goes on in schools must be oriented to pursue this objective. Otherwise, the primary justification for mandatory universal education will be irrelevant, and a recognizable America will be lost.
IV. Three Truths Fundamental to Every Good Lesson
Every bit of history I teach deals with human beings like us struggling for their lives and their values in a very harsh and unforgiving world. For what did they risk or sacrifice their lives? What was so valuable that it was worth living for, dying for, or killing for? This is the truth intrinsic to history, connecting us to our ancestors, and any history teacher worth his salt will clearly reveal this with integrity to the youth of today.
There is also a second truth, one regarding the students entrusted to my care. They need to learn worthwhile lessons in a healthy fashion, one that will inspire courage and creativity. They have intrinsic needs to be introduced to their American and Western cultural identities; to the shared convictions that bind us together as members of Western Civilization. Each student needs to be invited to join our society as self-supporting and independent citizens who are capable of perpetuating our Republic while pursuing their own big dreams.
The third truth involved in every classroom is the character, nature, skills, and weaknesses of the teacher. No one has ever taught the history of Western Civilization in exactly the way that I do. I cannot and should not try to emulate someone else’s approach.
To do my best by my students in bringing forward a living memory of those who made our world, I need to understand my own strengths, prejudices, talents, and blind spots. If I do, I can endeavor to compensate for my prejudices and blind spots while using my strengths and talents to create dynamic lessons that excite genuine interest and inspire thoughtful curiosity.
Any functional classroom will be founded upon and feature a balance of these three truths; the truth of our history, the truth of the students, and the truth of the teacher. Lessons come alive when they are infused by these truths. Students appreciate such truth as being intrinsically legitimate. Rooting teaching in these three truths shows students that these are lessons that deal with something of value that is worth their time and dedication.
V. What Then Must We Do?
This is why no school reform rooted in conformity can ever really bring about superior educational results. By dogmatically hamstringing teachers’ flexibility and denying the primacy of the three truths, centrally-mandated school reform replaces dynamism with mediocrity and conformity.
Without a return to disciplinary consequences, a focus on acculturation, and an emphasis on the truths of the subject matter, the students’ needs, and the teacher’s personal characteristics we will continue to fail to cultivate healthy and capable minds ready to boldly face challenges in order to build a better future. We can and should do better!
