The ideal role of the teacher

“ I touch the future. I teach.” —Christa McLuliffe.

Teaching is the highest act of charity.—Saint Augustine.

In restructuring and re-engineering the public schools, the role of teachers must be reevaluated. Teachers will become coordinators and consultants to learning. The teacher will teach the child to balance his academic mind with his moral character. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “ To educate a man in mind and not morals is to educate a menace to society.”

In the secondary schools, the teacher in the new structure will learn to work as a team with other teachers. His mind will be broadened to understand that all learning is related and that his subject specialty is related to other subjects. His classroom will no longer be labeled as the “History” or “English” classroom. He will be teaching the whole child—the mind and soul.

The teacher and his team will coordinate their knowledge to combine passive learning with active learning. This will be done by using technology and personal instruction, rather than class lectures. The team will move with the students from grade to grade as mentioned previously. In this manner students and teachers will coordinate their study closer. In addition, this will afford students a sense of continuity and stability with their teachers.

In the elementary schools, the teacher will become a stabilizing force to the students. He/she will motivate the students to learn by becoming more personal. The same teacher will move from grade to grade with the children to form a bond in the crucial formidable early years. The teacher will teach the whole child through understanding his environment as well as his learning ability.

The new teacher must also inculcate moral character development in the young student. He/she must duplicate what the child is taught at home concerning character development. In many cases the teacher may be the only one teaching character development because so many families today are dysfunctional. Confucius said, “ Men possess a moral nature; but if they are well fed, warmly clad, and comfortably lodged without at the same time being instructed, they become like unto beast.” The art of teaching involves awakening the spirituality in the child.

In all these structural changes, the teacher will revert to the top of the system and be the focal point of all learning instead of at the bottom where he/she is now. The heavy weight of bureaucracy will shift reverting to the bottom of the new structure. The student and the teacher will be the only reason that schools exist instead of being a foraging ground for free loaders.

Until the public school system returns the respect and responsibility the teaching profession deserves, all the money, all the modern gadgetry will be of no avail. We will continue searching futilely for a solution to our low performance. We have relegated the honorable profession of teaching to a mere job on the level of a blue collar worker.

Teachers are the cause and effect of a child’s sound education. There is no substitute. The new system will allow teachers to make decisions in the educational programs and in the management of the schools. This re-engineering will bring about unexpected results. The degrading of teachers must stop. Teachers are the reason students learn or do not.

“ In a completely rational society the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.” —Lee Iacocca.