As an educator, and therefore a person affecting young persons’ lives, I often think about ‘What I am doing and why am I doing it?’ What kind of young man and young woman will leave our school one day? What have we done well enough to prepare them for what follows?
Today, awash in a sea of media sources, and confronted on all sides by all those in an increasingly divided society who wish to possess the loyalty of our hearts and minds, I therefore would suggest that we need to remind ourselves that our schools are not political hothouses. We are not teaching and forming children for them to have an outlook – right here and now – that promotes a particular, sole social agenda nor any identifiable political ideology.
However, we definitely are training the young minds placed in our care to weigh up the ‘facts’ that the world continually holds up for our and their inspection. We are training them to prioritize and, most significantly, interpret. That way, every student who has had the training, and then a developed ability, to be a critical thinker, gradually and carefully will be confident in his or her own worldview – underscored by an accumulation of personal values – when negotiating life’s choppy waters. After all, living life well requires that well-practised life skill: being a critical thinker.
Regarding bespoke values, no school is entirely devoid of them, offering students a kind of neutral tabula rasa. To do so seems impossible. Individually and institutionally, we all possess values, namely, they way we think things should be. That’s education’s bottom line, right, a large part of our purpose as educators?
Although defined in myriad ways, no doubt, the ‘way things should be’ surely and fundamentally promotes the common good.
Indeed, our schools’ mission statements, and mottos, very publicly declare what is important about the way we wish to do things. More than that, how we daily promote the way things should be rubs off on our students’ beliefs and behaviours.
Recognizing that every school has a culture of its own, and no, never letting go of our core academic functions, like it or not we all are in the business of imparting values. Inevitably. We trust these values will prove very useful ones, of course, real tools that will serve our students well in life long after they pass through our doors for the last time.
In our schools, then, we are in the business of laying important ethical foundations, layer upon layer, like solid geological rock formations across successive generations.
Such layers predate others’. And happily so. (How worthwhile, or realistic, would it be for for us to have the very last word in our students’ character formation?) There will be time enough for our graduates who, hopefully, can continue their personal academic and ethical formation at university, to successfully enter the rough and tumble of our exciting, challenging, sometimes dangerous, and amazing world.
So, I submit that the following remain three effective questions.
a) What are we teachers doing and why are we doing it?
b) What does our institution value and prove that it values?
b) And, are we teachers, through our lessons and example, promoting the common good?
Tom MJ Wingate V
HeadTeacher
The Wingate School
Huixquilucan, Edomex