A Teacher as Vice-President?

An experienced teacher who understands the limitations and challenges of an education for citizenship.

In order to feel or sense what is going on in the present, one needs to see events as part of longer trends or patterns.  We can’t understand the present, or hold reasonable expectations about the future, when we are blind to the past.  Or what is worse, when we are misled about the past. 

For many the present is experienced as if, late to a performance, one slips into a back seat. Part of the stage, obscured.  Much of the language, foreign.  Many of the actors and actions, unexplained.

Even harder for those who want to understand, is that they find the stage very large and playing simultaneously many scenes, with many different plots.

Worse still we are told that our place is on stage, interacting with the players. That this is how we become “citizens.”

Many of us are not well prepared for this experience. With study we can improve our understanding. And we get by. But what about the next generation? Can’t we give them a better chance. We have the opportunity to give them the gift of truly effective citizenship.

And just how are we doing? I see scorecards. Quick Notes.  Plot Summaries. PowerPoint slides. How well are they being taught to understand the past, to evaluate the present and to experience the future?

If they rush on stage without knowledge they will add to the underlying chaos.  If they slink out of the theatre, they will be abandoning even the pretense of citizenship.

The world is neither order nor chaos.  A citizen is neither omniscient nor blind.  The players neither reenact the past nor bind the future.  But the present moment is wasted if we are ignorant of the past and without ideas about the future.  It is then that we follow only are own appetites, and the emotions of fear and anger. 

Another way to think about this is to see the present as a moment in a moving pageant of change.  We and all that exists on this world are rushing forward.  It is a constantly changing reality that we cannot stop.  But it can be altered. We can find our place and join others who are trying to influence the future.   And our children can do much better than we have done.

But will they? Are we leaving them unaware of the many roads we have been on in the past, or where these roads are leading, and without both understanding or conviction as to what values they should honor as they choose a future course for themselves or their community?    

We will die, but our civilization will go on. Our story is far from over. Each generation empowers and informs the next. One of the most important of all our responsibilities of citizens is to make certain that our many journeys will continue and that following generations will be prepared to make again and again the right choices as they guide our civilization and alter the natural world. 

I have taken a long path around in coming to the basis point of this column.

Our government, as well as each of us individually, is responsible for the education of our children.

People will find different things to like and dislike about candidates in this election.  For me, a candidate that struggled in the classroom to teach citizenship deserves not just honor and respect.  He may deserve our vote. He may well be better informed, and more passionate about, what I believe is the key issue that underlies all others, the education of the next generation of Americans.