Teaching Life--and Living It

Because our children spend so much of their time within school walls, and derive so many of their fixed impressions and habits and attitudes from the hours and the days spent there, parents have both the right and the obligation to know what they are learning, from books, from teachers, and from association with their comrades⎯what they are learning of the lessons of life in all its fields of knowledge. Of course, we may think we have done our duty in this respect when we have seen that Johnny is studying Latin, and science, and grammar, and history, and a number of other things. But labels in catalogues may not mean any more than labels in many other places. The same subject taught by two different teachers may scarcely be recognizable as the same subject⎯so great is the variety of individual color, personal bias, and point of views, and so potent a factor is their personality and personal life of the teacher. That is why parents are obliged to be concerned beyond the listings in the catalogue and in the published curriculum; and that is why it seems pertinent to ask the question: How can a man teach life if he can’t live it? Education is an all-embracing process, and so therefore is teaching⎯and both go far beyond putting the right question and the right answer on the blackboard. Teaching involves life in all its phases, and in order to be fit to teach life, one must be able to live it, because children are so much impressed by their teachers, not only in the laying down of formal rules, but also by their personal example in the schoolroom, on the school grounds, and off the school grounds. And so, as our children go to school, we have a right to expect that the influences they find there will go beyond mere academic exposure⎯beyond the tables of multiplication and the rules of grammar⎯that beyond all this they will there find lives worthy of emulation, because teaching is and must be considered to be a sacred trust, a career requiring dedication of self⎯a profession that demands highly ethical living, so that a child may know that what his teacher says is the truth, and that how he lives will be in conformity with what he says, in order that his teachings will not be lost, and that the lives of children will not be misdirected by something that speaks louder than words.