My Late Father Was a Great Teacher. He Wouldn’t Last a Week in the Modern Classroom.

[mountaineer]

My Late Father Was a Great Teacher. He Wouldn’t Last a Week in the Modern Classroom.
Jeremy S. Adams
17 Oct 2021

My father passed away a few weeks ago. He had spent his entire working life teaching junior high and high school students. Most communities in our country possess a few teachers of my father’s ilk, educators who are considered local celebrities—the type who can rarely enter a restaurant or movie theatre without encountering at least a smattering of former students or thankful parents. ...

Here was a man who ardently believed in the Socratic method of teaching, walking up and down rows of desks, never allowing anyone to hide in a classroom crevice or sulk with proud indifference. Students eventually came to understand that his affection for them was intimately tied to his belief in their capacity to learn and achieve. After all, a good teacher doesn’t tolerate student ignorance or indifference.

And yet, my father would probably be appalled to learn that the Socratic method is woefully out of step with a generation of young people who find feelings—not facts, evidence, or knowledge—to be sovereign. Challenging a young person to defend the material they devour on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter—and doing so in front of the entire class, mind you—would probably land him in a bit of hot water these days. Administrators would demand to know the learning objective to which his questioning was tied. Parents would complain about how “uncomfortable” their son or daughter now felt. Fellow teachers would counsel him, “Be careful. Let them think whatever they want to think.” ...

 If you were in his second period class (home room) you learned the proper cadence of the Pledge of Allegiance. “There is no comma after ‘nation’ and before ‘under God,’” he thundered at successive generations. He always respected those who didn’t say the Pledge for religious reasons but would probably be aghast at the blasé, nondescript platitudes offered up by modern students who can rarely articulate concrete reasons for sitting during the national anthem beyond avant-garde pieties about generalized “oppression” or “white supremacy.” ...

He understood a truth about America that has been painfully forgotten in modern times: success—even the faintest whisper or morsel of it—requires colossal sacrifice. And yet, even when sacrifice and patience and pertinacity are emphatically practiced, still—still!—success can prove excruciatingly elusive. ...  My father taught the way he did because he recognized the unpleasant truth that the world only honors those who are willing to grind, drudge, and eek their way towards a goal, even a modest one. ...

Young Americans want the freedom that excuses indulgence, but not the freedom that demands self-reliance. They are mired in a moment in history where nihilism has become conventional wisdom and the traditional pillars of excellence—diligence, duty, dedication—are smugly transmogrified into relics of a bygone era. This is how we arrive at a place where students can retake tests as many times as they want to, a place where schools now have more than a dozen valedictorians every spring, a place where a student caught cheating during a test is likely defended rather than punished by his parent. ...

Read entire article at Quillette

[DB]

"They are mired in a moment in history where nihilism has become conventional wisdom and the traditional pillars of excellence—diligence, duty, dedication—are smugly transmogrified into relics of a bygone era."

Actually, they openly call that white supremacy now.