In Defense of Teachers

As is my habit, I like to give exceptional contrary responses to anything I've written its own featured place. The following is a response to my post "Active Citizenship" written by my friend who is incidentally, the English teacher who prompted my thought excursion. A passioned, energetic and well-reasoned defense, I think it deserves a serious read. I will respond in the comments section.

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Because you never discuss the various manifestations of civic duty, I stumble over your pessimistic assertion that “most educators under 50 feel they owe the Country nothing more than a check.” Similarly, because it remains unclear what qualifies for you as “a contribution to the body politic,” it is difficulty for me to understand why you believe most teachers are not qualified to teach citizenship. However, I am sure you would agree that civic duty could take on many forms beyond enlisting in your nation’s military forces. Teachers take on the responsibility of providing rising generations with the core knowledge and skills necessary to actively participate in, and perhaps even improve, their communities. For example, an English teacher’s fundamental goals are to teach a student to read critically and write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Most English teachers I know, myself included, believe there is tremendous power in the written word and that being able to identify and use rhetorical devices in a given text allows us to understand how we are persuaded to believe in another’s ideas and how we can develop convincing arguments ourselves. Such skills, which fall under the nebulous category of critical thinking skills, can prevent us from being snowed into buying material items for the wrong reasons based on slick advertisement techniques or falling victim to more dangerous propaganda. Critical thinking is the keystone of active citizenship. Your friend who decided he could not criticize the Country without contributing was demonstrating just this.

Furthermore, while I agree with you that it is important for teachers to resist the temptation to indoctrinate their students according to their personal political persuasions, teachers, whether they are conscious of it or not, are indoctrinating students in American values. After all, America’s public education roots are firmly planted in this purpose—to gather children from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds and teach them a common and unifying core of knowledge, mythology and skills that serves the country’s economic and political progress. Therefore, teaching children is indeed a civic duty-- it is a contribution to the larger society. In my seven years of teaching, nearly one thousand students have passed through my classroom. Equipping a thousand people with improved literacy skills, not to mention the peripheral skills, ethics, and ideas that are taught through the literature we read and the discussions generated, is a significant contribution to the Country. Therefore, I believe I am qualified to teach citizenship.

However, above and beyond what I maintain is the civic duty intrinsic in the act of teaching our nation’s youth, most teachers I know seem to have an inherent drive to improve and protect their communities, a drive at the heart of civic duty. These teachers create curriculum that models and demonstrates this value, and perhaps even provides students with the opportunity to experience civic participation. At minimum, a Humanities teacher will expose students to a variety of American leaders who have created change in their communities models the character, values and pathways necessary to become an active citizen. But many of us go beyond this level of exposure to experiential learning as well. It is not difficult for me to incorporate civic duty into a grade-based system. For example, during the last election year, my students were required to participate in a campaign effort for a candidate of their choosing running for any level of political office. A certain number of hours, an evaluation by a supervisor, a final paper and presentation all contributed to a cumulative grade.
But even better, I watch students move towards voluntary active citizenship as a result of having this value modeling for them by teachers and their curriculum. And this leads me to respond to your statements on the role that character (or according to you, lack thereof) plays in school. I think civic duty does indeed begin with watching or reading the news, and doing so is not the same as watching or reading sports. The action of educating ourselves in the activities of our nation and other nations is the beginning of recognizing the larger communities to which we belong. Therefore, we begin to care about these larger communities; we begin to realize how we influence (both positively and negatively) them, and then often, our investment in these larger communities grows. For example, over the last two years of teaching at a private school based in a low-income, African-American neighborhood, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the lack of interaction between the school and its surrounding community. My students regarded members of the neighborhood with suspicion, fear and gross generalizations. Furthermore, the community itself is in crisis, wrestling with the usual suspects that emerge in a poor neighborhood—gangs, drugs, homicide. So I started attending meetings at city hall with our district supervisor, who wants to harness the interfaith community in this district to become a force that responds to the community’s problems. This led to the idea of an interfaith teen council. All I had to do is choose 4-5 students who I have watched become increasingly conscious and concerned for the worlds beyond the small one they move through on a daily basis (home, school), who demonstrate leadership and initiative, character traits I am convinced they learned, at least partially, in school. These students started accompanying me at the city council meetings--not because their participation was required or counted towards a grade. But simply because they care and they want to live up to the expectations of mentors they respect. I think this example illustrates that schools are quite capable of helping students build character. Earning an A on a paper after a semester’s worth of Bs and Cs, being caught cheating and suffering not only concrete consequences, but also the disapproval of a teacher you respect, overcoming the fear of public speaking, these are all character building experiences that take place in schools.