So what must we remaining Warrior-Scholars do now that so many of our sisters and brothers in education have evaporated from the heat? My belief is that we give our educational leaders an F, as in fuggeddaboutit, and reawaken our moral and ethical duties as human beings. We must educate as if it mattered again. We must bear witness to the fact that to be an educ-ate-or means to be one who actively educes another to become something more. And we must bare this credo into a tomorrow that perceives women and men, not simply as cogs in the corporate machine, but beings with hopes and dreams, all working to become more fully human each moment of every day. For too long, too many teachers have cowered before our Administrators, our Districts, our State Public Education Departments, our Federal Department of Education, and the corporations that influence (or outright control) them all. We swallowed our intellectual, moral, and ethical righteousness as a spouse does to save the kids from seeing the parents fight. We have been abused- at best professionally, at worst emotionally and psychologically- and have allowed the abuse of our students- young women and men we see as our own children- to go unchallenged. We have reached that vital first step where we admit there is a problem and that we need help. We clearly dont YET have the money or the institutional power to challenge the corporations and the bureaucrats. Saying otherwise would be foolish and naive. Still, we have veritable multitudes that CEOs and bureaucracies dont have- PEOPLE. Im not suggesting we tell kids school aint cool or to reject the curriculum. That would be unethical and immoral, something not resonant with our rediscovered righteousness. No, I am suggesting we rethink our nearly-impossible task of collectively raising a nation of global citizens. Questions are inevitably birthed from this re-awareness: What will this reawakened educational system be FOR? What will it be AGAINST? Who will this system be for? Who will it be against? While my very human ego has its own beliefs as to the answers to these provocative questions, these questions cannot be answered alone or implemented from the top-down. They should be asked by every citizen and must be asked by every Warrior-Scholar who remains. We must then answer this question together and walk hand-in-hand into a tomorrow closer to our hopes and dreams than we ever dared imagine.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 14:32:48 +0000
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