To What (Greater) Purpose?

The reason it used to be common practice in business for employees to work "30 and out" is that cycles change completely during 30 years: perhaps a couple of times. What existed when an employee was hired is no longer part of the paradigm when the same employee reaches age 60. Thus, it is easier to retire that employee than to provide answers to hard questions, such as why?

One of the most significant changes during my classroom tenure has been the inclusion of diversity, which meant the exclusion of many educational principles and practices, such as specific language to describe occupations; i.e., mailman has become letter carrier and/or postal service employee, serviceman is now service member, mankind is now either humankind or personhood, and there are both actors and actresses. Stripping words of unique characteristics often changes both the original intent and the impact of the word, but someone decided about 40 years ago that the language would benefit from non-gender-specificity and, thus, it became policy and practice.

If a teacher does not agree and/or insists on using the old-fashioned expressions, s/he could well lose his/her job and/or be subjected to disciplinary intervention by his/her site administrator.

This week, our school children are being inducted into a self-aggrandizing educational approach to set the tone for the newest generation of schoolchildren: rather than asking students to define global goals and objectives for themselves, their community, and their country, children are being asked what they each can do to assist the (first African-American) President of the United States to reach his (there is no her) goals. Perhaps this approach is a step up from the denigration of the previous (American) President of the United States, who was openly trashed in classrooms across the country during the last Presidential election by fair-minded citizens and teachers without repercussion, but it is still an unusual tact to teach children to use in their political future.

Imagine if I asked the students in my high school classroom to write a letter to me detailing how each of them will help me to achieve my personal goals during the coming year: WTF? No way! That conversation would escalate to the "What the hell are you thinking?" firestorm that would rage through the family and occupy my planning period in front of the site administrator for the next month or so. Back in the early days, teacher training included working with students to set incremental educational (and, sometimes personal behavioral) goals for themselves that could be monitored throughout the school year. The goals were for the student's success, not for the teacher's: it was assumed that the teacher had a different set of goals, both professional and personal, and would work to accomplish those as the children worked on their goals.

The photogenic young spokesperson justified that it was a mis-step in preparing the educational materials, not a political crisis, and expressed her angst that there is so much over-reaction to such a simple assignment that has already been fixed. She apparently either lacks the wisdom of the ages and/or job experience to follow the logic of the citizens who are questioning the educational implications of the big picture: (1) why is the President's (political) speech being required nation-wide as part of this semester's curriculum from grades K-12 (2) how bias-free are the materials (including political, gender, and racial point of view) (3) what is the educational value of the activity?

If the only justification is "because I say so," the whole idea is on shaky ground.

The independent thinking process of the individual citizen in the United States of America is paramount to the democratic political system. It is a pain in the ass to have a parent come charging into the classroom, demanding why? why? why?, but knowing that parent is always on the way in helps each of us to prepare better lessons and to do a better job for the students in the seats. It isn't about me keeping my job; it's about me doing my job. If I don't know what I am doing, why I am doing it, and the goal for what I've planned, I have no business doing it.

If the goal of the President's speech is to engage students in the politics of the country, perhaps a better question than how each of them can help the President set and achieve his goals requires the changing of one word: how can each of them help the country to achieve its goals. The President's job is to set his own goals, personally and professionally, and then work to achieve them, even by asking his two school-age daughters for their input. If he does not feel that he can do that over the course of a four-year term in office without input from the nation's school children, perhaps he needs to fend off the questions of the irate parents and be called to the principal's office, too.