As the new homestead becomes more organized and the panoramic windows of the sunroom show the light of a new day the quiet of a home still asleep affords me time for reflection, meditation, and prayer. I love this time. In this morning’s reflection, I thought about the role our educators play in shaping society.
Without educators, society would not advance. We’d still be trying to figure out how to use rocks as tools to shape our environment, feed, and protect ourselves. Each generation would be starting from scratch, rather than building on the lessons of previous generations. The people who choose to share their knowledge and insight is one of the things that separates us from other species – that and the fact we use disposable footwear.
Throughout the history of mankind, there have been those who’ve discovered great truths and have shared those discoveries with others, and there have been those who although they’ve not discovered great things learned of them and passed them along to a much broader audience. These “teachers” have been and are the backbone of our civilization. Because of them, we have advanced from small isolated nomadic tribes into great societies.
I think of a teacher as one who opens the eyes of the young, not to a particular belief, but to the almost infinite variety of the world around them. Teachers differ from trainers in this important aspect. Trainers teach someone how to do a specific thing in an approved manner. On the other hand, teachers should instill a desire to learn, to think, to question and to expand their personal horizon. The better they are at creating a questioning mind the closer they come to greatness. Unfortunately, despite today’s trend for participation trophies, greatness is found only in the smallest minority of the population. The rest of us struggle to just be above average, or surrender to life and become numbers on a bell-shaped curve.
Teaching has always come with some risk. Take, for example, Socrates. Perhaps the first great philosopher of Athens, teacher of Plato and Xenophon[1], he is credited with creating the basis for modern (Western) logic and argument. Yet, as Athens declined he was tried, convicted, and executed for arguing against the way Athenians clung to past glory rather than advance their political thinking. Perhaps that will always be the way with education; those great thinkers among us see things differently and when the traditional ways are challenged there is a societal push back.
But not every teacher is a Socrates or a Plato. As we see in modern media, the idea of rigorous debate, logic, and argument are as much out of favor today as in ancient Greece. There are those who cling to the past, and there are those who revile it. So, what is the role of a teacher in these times? Is to indoctrinate the young into thinking in the right way, or is it to create a questioning mind open to the possibilities?
From my perch – it seems to me the institutions where debate, argument, and enlightenment should occur have turned into training centers rather than high schools, colleges, and universities. Young minds are not opened to the possibilities, they are shaped into the same boxes their educators were shaped into and come away with a belief system so fragile it cannot stand up to challenge. If challenged – the response is almost always visceral. Isn’t this what we see in society today? Who trained these behaviors into our young? The answer is simple, we did. As parents and teachers, we have taught our children to act as they do, but we have also trusted our educators to maintain and strengthen our society, but it seems they have moved away from that role into one of their own choosing.
Perhaps it’s because we’ve moved decisions on education away from a local level of cooperative control to indifferent State and Federal bureaucracies, or maybe it is because our teachers have been trained by those who disparage our society? Then again, perhaps it is as the entertainment industry has informed us we are too narrow-minded to be trusted with educational decisions and they must be left to education professionals with PhDs? Could it be perhaps as simple as the age-old struggle between workers and owners? Is it possible the unionization of teachers where the power of the union, and politicians willing to spend other people’s money, have made the unions so powerful they are able to protect politically important but incompetent teachers who are committed to the success of a single political party over the ideals of true liberal education, which opens the minds of students and teaches them to think for themselves? Everyone seems to have an opinion on a cause, but I don’t see a lot of viable solutions, and what has the current system gained us?
1 comment:
You are correct in most of your observations. I am so proud of my wife, your sister, who fostered a love of learning, growth and self-esteem in her classroom throughout her teaching career.
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