The Important Difference Between Teaching and Educating By Jack Christmas, June 2013 Each child is born knowing the truth.... The challenges and obstacles detouring him from this original knowledge and wisdom are the same barriers that have been pre established by a society and world they were born into in order to perpetuate whatever imposed fickle and false definition of “educational achievement,” the current established order praises or desperately clings to. Forced to forget the wisdom they were naturally bestowed with in the first place so that they can succeed, perform, achieve and progress, our children have become more socially and historically alienated from their ancestors than any prior generation. Many, understandably, accuse technology of being the catalyst or culprit guilty of propelling this “disconnection” between what now is (the young) and what once was (the old). Throughout our human history however, new scientific, military and medical advancements always threatened the established way of our condition yet never as severely as now. I believe this is due to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and its brutal pragmatic requirement that all who follow in its wake must accept regimentation, routine, poverty and the fully horrific self realization that one is powerless to change life or act upon events that are needed to improve it. What else besides greed, arrogance and self delusion can explain or excuse the proliferation and acceptance of Mc educational programs in our universities that hand out degrees in “phuckology.” Wannabe “edministrators” that have spent one or two years in a classroom are economically and academically rewarded for their flaccid professional ambition instead of the teaching veterans who employ an actual genuine commitment to the young, who they emphatically believe and tirelessly argue, are owed an honest experience that is designed to empower instead of indoctrinate. One hundred years ago, you could teach a child how to read sitting under a tree with a bible. Now teachers need acknowledged confirmation from a system determined to thwart their sincere endeavors so that the dilapidated structure “educators” worship, continues to thrive and serve as the only model for what their colleagues deem relevant and progressive. The intentional destruction of art, music, and history programs in our high schools has neutered the future of critical thinking components essential to the development of our civilization’s existence. Values such as courtesy and humility have been substituted with vacuous and vague assurances that “self esteem,” will see a young person through life’s hardships and a future that promises them only eternal debt. What has become of learning? Where is the wonder? Where is the magic that so many of my students have yearned for during their 14 or 18 year odyssey through schools and classes that would rather trick them in order to prove them wrong rather than empower them so they know what’s right? AP history? Are you kidding? I taught at that level for more than six years. If you think those classes reflect an accurate measurement of your child’s understanding of the topic, you are misinformed. It only gauges whether or not a student thinks like everyone else. Friends, our best moments as a species were not initiated by educators, sycophants and technicians. They were fought for and preserved by teachers, iconoclasts and dreamers who daringly idealized a world where imagination was valued as being more crucial to the evolution of our nature rather than infinite consumption and the blind acceptance of products that only dehumanize us and make us feel more powerless. These “inappropriate rebels,” are the same people we are taught to admire and then forced to forget in our quest to conform, perform, produce, and consume as much of whatever they tell us we artificially desire, hollowly accomplish and yet, not truthfully need. Due to the cheap utilization of coercion employed by a system suffering from cultural amnesia yet reveling in self importance, our legacy to our future caretakers only serves to insure a helpless, dependent and ungrateful litter of ambitious, selfish, and arrogant servants that equate the liability of desire with the virtue of goodness. This is to be expected in a nation where the wealth and resources usurped from its original inhabitants have been wantonly wasted in order to maximize personal profits for a few rather than creating a self reflective generation of young people who value and appreciate the invention, imagination and industry of their recent ancestors. It is difficult to profess the crucial value of moral virtues to children when the speed of the technological environment they occupy is developing faster than our society’s ability to emotionally evolve. Why should my high school students listen to me when I implore them to at least consider the universal values that helped all our predecessors endure the “short, nasty and brutish,” world our forebears struggled to survive in? Their connection to the past and to our initial relationship with the natural world has been obliterated by 150 years of scientific materialism and logical positivism that proposes to replace the importance of individual action with self worship and blind reverence of progress. The responsibility of the true teacher then, is to help direct and assist children back upon a path of wisdom and courage and humility that will lead them to the original state of knowing that they have been led astray from. The youth of today then are torn between the genuine state of truth given them by our maker versus the frustration and utter hopelessness of facing the absurd task of proselytizing themselves before a false god that they already know in their hearts has been created to protect and serve the wealthy, powerful, corrupt and educated. The condition of education in the United States is a shameful and dangerous combination of arrogance, irresponsibility, ignorant mismanagement and ass covering that serves to undermine the values that this nation was founded upon. The absolute intentional removal of independent instruction and personal autonomy that teachers once possessed has been replaced by a worship of the “new research” and graduate school blather that proposes “we should all become one” in the name of that abstract concept that supposedly advocates diversity yet insidiously promotes collectivism and self abasement. School districts across the United States currently seek out and employ “educators” instead of “teachers” that have no content knowledge in their subject nor a personal devotion to their field. They are however, current in the ways of the new pseudo strategies, taxonomies, psychological jingoisms and other false pedagogical mandates incorporated into “teacher education” programs across our country that manufacture and propagate a watered down myopic agenda that rewards conformity and obedience yet reacts fearfully against and punishes most modes of self realization, spiritual inquisitiveness and historical awareness. Exalted by educational psychologists and supported by “edministrators” wanting to disown their professional obligations in favor of securing their own positions as leaders in a field that is completely bankrupt in terms of providing quality inquiry and developing curiosity, our society digests what they are told is real learning. Contrary to the health and creative spirit which stimulates critical thinking skills, educators and their methods for instructing today’s children are really doing nothing more than deforming young people in to a complacent, subservient and most alarming, apathetic state regarding their personal and divine voyage through life that was promised to them by us, their forbears. Have we lied? Have we given up? Not me, my present, past or future scholars, for in each one of you over the past 25 years that I have had the honor of discovering life’s mysteries with, I have found in myself a reflection of all of your pure good hearts as well as the necessary ammunition needed to fight these blue nosers. I witness daily the futile gesture of ignorant and self congratulatory beasts who wish to block your escape to individual enlightenment by producing as many soul crushing obstacles as they are allowed to and miraculously, it has not deterred you from the original “knowing” divinely and naturally given to you at birth. Your questions in class and your ability to withstand the tsunami of meaningless twaddle courageously destroys and refutes our society’s obsession with acquiring more useless crap. It has also instilled in your bald professor, an inner compulsion to teach to as many of you as I can, the values of kindness, courage, compassion, truth and humility required in navigating the modern abyss we call “education” not “learning.” That is why I would rather “observe” you than “grade” you or “explain” not “dictate” or “celebrate” rather than “evaluate” or “discover” instead of “demand” and, most crucially of all, TEACH you, and not educate you. What would you choose? Would you like to be taught or educated? Exactly.....me too. Why are we forcing our young people to surrender what they knew to be true when they were born and then charge them and their parents money for an education that promises to instill the values that they were blessed with initially then instructed to ignore anyway? What a sham my scholars...to make you pay for something that you already possess....what a joke my charges....to assume that you will lie down while those that are less wise but more disciplined goose step upon your dreams...Hold on and keep searching....always listen to your heart.....don’t stop investigating what inspires wonder and interests you.... AND... try to avoid anyone who says they are an expert and please remember...those that say, don’t know and those that know, won’t say. God bless you all and goodnight. JC
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:46:55 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015