Remember your teachers?
The best ones were understanding, imaginative, strong, courageous, humble and generous. Therefore you felt appreciated and you reciprocated with appreciation for them and their lessons. You appreciate them even today. That is why, “Teachers never die” — the first line of The Wonder Years episode entitled, “Goodbye.” It is the finest 20 minutes ever produced for television.
The first 10 minutes are at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1o_IMpm9cM
To view the whole episode, the next 5 minutes are at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Rnaslr21M
and the final 5 minutes are at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=468h7-R1awU
I am moved by this episode and viewer comments because I love the beauty of human virtue. This episode is beautiful on many levels. I explain them at:
http://sixvirtues.com/blog/2010/08/13/the-wonder-years-goodbye-a-tribute-to-teachers/
Not all teachers are as influential as the fictional Mr. Collins. Your mediocre teachers delivered lessons, but they didn’t “grab you.” They blended into your school experience, and you remember little about them or their lessons. Mediocre teachers were understanding, strong, and generous, but also unimaginative, afraid of truth, and proud. They were the models for American graduates with understanding that is unimaginative, strong character that is fearful of truth, and generosity that emerges from pride.
Bad teachers may have understood their topic, but their lack of virtue made you feel unappreciated; and you reciprocated with a lack of appreciation for them and their lessons — even to this day.
The six virtues (definitions here) always have been the mark of the influential teacher. American policymakers and educators haven’t discovered this truth because they are looking in the wrong place. They search the social sciences to improve what is an art — the art of working with young people to answer two philosophical questions:
1. What does it mean to be educated?
2. How can we move toward that ideal?
Public educators and policymakers ignore philosophical questions because they can’t be turned into profits, like social science findings. The internet, for example, is now a marketplace for the sale of all kinds of research-based educational materials and workshops.
Public education has become a venue for powerful people to pursue their own interests:
1. Business people and industrialists claim public education’s purpose is to prepare a work force for business and industry. (Is there a shallower purpose?)
2. Researchers, scholars, and publishing houses produce books about “best practices,” not because they discovered ”best practices,” but because such claims earn scholarly reputations and profits.
3. Politicians claim they will hold teachers accountable for higher student test scores, not because higher scores are an important purpose, but because it is a purpose for which teachers can be held accountable — by politicians seeking re-election.
4. And hundreds of thousands of teachers believe teaching is an applied social science, even though the memorable ones practice it as an art.
Anthony Cody uses different language to make some of the same points:
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/08/overcoming_despair_as_we_fight.html
If you have been in a situation in which the six virtues made things better, please submit a story for consideration in the next book. Click on Email Casey Hurley. Provide your name and phone number. I will call to record your story. Before anything goes to press, you will have final approval.
