This weekend is Parents weekend at my daughter’s university. Yesterday I sat in on a literature class and I left energized! How long has it been since I have been stretched to think outside my normal parameters? To think deeply about the meaning and cultural context of a poem or a short story? Do I think of rap songs as poetry? Did I know that the United States always has a poet laureate to record its history? Sitting just through one college class reminded me how much fun it is to learn! Hard work? Yes? Drudgery? Never! At least not when you listen to a teacher or professor who loves what they are teaching. It is infectious!
So how can we infect our younger people with this love of learning? I confess I don’t know what the answer is to our education system. But it can’t be more testing or better testing. It has to lie with empowering teachers. Teachers hold the key to awakening the love of learning in kids. Personally I remember when history came alive for me. I was in junior high and my teacher started talking about how a personal disagreement between 2 people eventually led to a large fight between nations. Wow! Who cared about exact dates of battles? I was confronted with the big picture in human terms! I will always be grateful to that teacher even though I cannot remember his name. History was a living subject to him and he loved it….so I learned to love it!
Certainly, one of the keys to developing young minds is more reading and less visual stimulation. We were created with the abilitThisy to have vivid imaginations but that skill needs to be exercised. Reading about a scene and then visualizing it is far different from just seeing it on a screen. That is why it is often disappointing to see a movie based on a book you have already read. The characters look different than you imagined!
I believe that teaching is a most sacred profession. How a teacher is teaching children is often more important than what is decided in boardrooms by highly paid executives. It is definitely more important than the latest NFL trade. It is not the place for indoctrination of the latest social agenda. The classroom is for instilling the ability to read, the love of learning, the need and freedom to ask questions, and the confidence to seek out what is true. We, the parents, need to defend for our kids. Let them have their French fries for lunch. It is the Junk Food of the classroom we need to get eliminate from our schools.
