S. Fleet (Parent & Teacher): Ours is a humanistic profession, dedicated to the wellbeing of others. No person, genuinely committed to the art of teaching, views education as a field improved by competition. Competition in education uses students as a means to an end and does not see students as ends in themselves. Consequently, moral education requires teachers to promote collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication as valued processes through which students come to understand the subjects that they study and, ultimately, themselves. This process is not more valuable in mathematics than it is in art, or in history than it is in science. Teachers value thought and they value truth. Teachers recognize that ethical relationships in a democratic society depend upon the ability to pursue understanding and to generate judgments in all of the realms where the mind might choose to play… and not to seek artificial separations that prejudice and divide. Seeing an athlete express her understanding of form and movement provides as vital a glimpse of education as hearing an aspiring engineer enthusiastically explain the power of inertia. The means and subjects of expression all serve to promote ends that are necessarily undefined and immeasurable. Should education determine the end, should it submit to the demands of workplaces or examinations or affiliations, it fails. This is the most vital component to freedom. Teachers understand education as a process of activation, as the promotion of undefined possibilities energized by specifics of subjects, but essentially reconfigured in unconventional and unpredictable ways by the minds of learners. Ours is a cooperative enterprise. We know that the power of student curiosity can be activated in all areas of study and that no secret ingredient exists that reduces education to certainty. We depend upon the diversity of personality, the perseverance of professionals and the uncertainty of outcome to know that we are successful. Societies that believe they have identified the end, the final goal of education, no longer promote freedom because they have deluded themselves into believing they now have identified the realm to which they must escort the mind. I find great relief when I work with young people who, rather than following the simplistic dictates of ignorance, summon the courage to act upon their knowledge. There is no clearer glimpse of hope than that.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 23:16:53 +0000
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