Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World

As a high school art teacher, I always encouraged my students to think “outside the box,” to find new ways of doing things, to explore new options, to experiment. That is the essence of learning: to try, fail, and to try again, sometimes to fail again, but ultimately to succeed. Never did I attempt to spoon-feed my students into thinking that “one-size-fits-all” and that “my way” was the only way. I stand by that philosophy of learning and if I were to go back and do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Today, in many schools and classrooms across our nation, (I have witnessed this first hand), we have lost the art of teaching and are now spoon-feeding our students and not allowing, at best not encouraging, them to learn for themselves. Granted, we are fighting uphill tooth-and-nail to maintain our students’ attention and sever the grip of Tik-Tok and Snapchat, however, we cannot succeed if we continue to lower the bar, give them grades they don’t deserve because it may hurt their feelings and continue to worry more about our students social-emotional health more than their ability to learn and teach themselves, to experiment, to have fun and to help them realize that there is no danger in failing and trying new things. That is and has always been the battle.

Make no mistake, we are at war. We are fighting a war for the imaginations and the hearts and minds of the younger generation. And by all accounts we are failing. We, as parents and educators, need to take back the course of education from unions and bureaucrats, and begin to teach with rigor and compassion, yet hold everyone, especially ourselves, but ultimately our children to a higher standard.