Did It Take?
Elizabeth Massie, writer, who studied English and science at James Maddison University, posted this on Facebook recently.
It’s a beautiful sentiment, but one that comes with a very, very high price to the teacher. I spent a career trying to teach kids to question and to think for themselves, to think critically. Sadly, through no fault of their own, most were immune to the concept because they had been raised to accept dogma as truth. Many thought I was trying to cause trouble, and only a handful took the reins of their own lives and rode on to their wonderful destinies. A number of them are friends of mine on Facebook. A small reward, but a reward just the same.
The best teachers I have known in my life, both as a student and as a teacher myself, were far more intelligent than I was: they were naturally curious, thoughtful, and always questioning. They were readers and explorers, of the world and of the mind. The system being what it has been for over 140 years with very little adjustment for the times, these wonderful Socratic educators had the good sense to leave the profession before it destroyed them. The two or three who displayed the highest levels of intellectual integrity and who took the biggest risks in honor of their calling-- who refused to hand their classrooms over to lesser instructors who had been knighted by august institutions of higher learning as "teachers" when all they really were were points of delivery for stale and useless information, and who, in spite of their better judgement elected to stay and fight the good fight --were eventually fired, hounded out of the profession by parents and administrators who wouldn't have known Socrates if they bumped into him, or, like war-weary soldiers who had kept their vows to defend, simply faded away into obscurity, wondering what it had all been for.
One such man I knew was my biology teacher in high school, Mr. Trenchak. An inventive, creative man who brought something new to class every day-- a conundrum, a question, a piece of trivia --he made us think and want to learn more on our own. We had no idea from day to day what "fun fact" or weird slice of randomness Mr. Trenchak was going to bring to the discussion, but we wanted to know. "Weird scenes inside the goldmine," Jim Morrison would have called it.
Another was a math teacher, a colleague- we’ll call him Mr. Polacio, who built magnificent balsa wood sailing ships to minute, ridiculous scale and then put them in bottles. A man who, when he wasn't carving and painting exquisitely detailed clipper ships and schooners from scratch, was playing classical piano and showing his students how math and music were interconnected via geometry. Every geometrical shape has its own unique musical note, he explained, so that if one sketched out a sailing ship on graph paper and assigned each shape in each grid its corresponding note, then transcribed it onto a music staff, when assembled, the ship's diagram would read and play as an honest-to-goodness piece of music. And though he was greatly admired by his students, he was ultimately vilified by administrators and parents in the community for doing something remarkably un-teacher-like and wonderfully romantic: he fell in love with one of his students and married her after she graduated. He was not remembered for the miracles he performed in the classroom or for his extraordinary and diversified talents as a marvelous and inspiring educator, but for being a man whose sense of wonder knew no bounds— and that included love. He was remembered for doing exactly what he was encouraged to do: he thought and stepped outside the box in a system where humanity’s box-- the humanities —has been filled with disdain and the wrong kind of skepticism, the cynical, judgmental, hurtful kind.
I would argue that for every child who learns to think critically, not only will a conspiracy theory die, so will prejudice, hate, ignorance, fairy tale religion, intolerance, insecurity, mistrust . . .
My guess is that you've probably encountered one or two teachers or mentors in your life who endeavored to inculcate productive skepticism, inquisitiveness, and critical thinking in you while outwardly playing along with the bots in the institutional game of School.
My question is, did it take?
