From time to time, I meet with a classmate who is also a Jewish educator, now retired. We started teaching in 1966. Whenever we get together our conversation eventually turns to the state of education today. We witnessed many changes in educational philosophy, student expectations and parental input. We also remember what education was like for us as students in the ’50s and how that model has changed. Our own approach and educational philosophy was to have expectations, respect student diversity, and make students want to learn more than what’s in the textbook. Over the decades we have seen our students go on to make their mark in academia or various professions, and we still meet former students and even parents who express their gratitude and appreciation for our efforts. The adults that we both teach in our synagogues are also appreciative, but they study because they want to.
We compare notes, emails and letters from former students, filled with testimonials validating our approach and passion. The ubiquitous nature of the worldwide web allows students from many decades past to reconnect. Often they comment that they appreciate what we did now more than when we were doing it decades ago. Our “tough love” approach, which may have seemed personal, mean and unbearable at times, was now understood to be the inspiration and motivation they needed to push them to reach for their potential. Our students eventually came to understand that our affection for them was intimately tied to our belief in their capacity to learn and achieve. We did not tolerate student ignorance or indifference.
Although I am a dinosaur, I still teach high school students and I read articles from many different education journals. I am 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 supreme. Challenging a young person to defend the material they devour on TikTok, Instagram or Twitter—and doing so in front of the entire class, apparently often lands teachers in hot water these days. Administrators demand to know the learning objective to which this questioning was tied. Parents complain about how “uncomfortable” their son or daughter now feels. Fellow teachers counsel: “Be careful. Let them think whatever they want to think.”
I maintained a certain decorum in class because a classroom is a serious place, and serious places demand respectful behavior. In elementary school I learned the proper cadence of the Pledge of Allegiance. I am aghast as I read of 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.”
Aside from limudei kodesh, I teach history and literature and I show how these subjects are instructive about the human condition, but I have too much regard for the transformative power of literature to ever use it as a political bludgeon with which to insist upon different forms of “representation.” I never judge literature through a postmodern kaleidoscope of race, gender or class. I simply ask if the reading was instructive about love or hope or death or dreams. Did it touch on vital and timeless human concerns? Did it connect a young mind to a mature aspiration or did it perhaps transform adolescent thinking into something resembling wisdom or fortitude?
I don’t apologize for high standards. As I said, I am a dinosaur. My approach may cause some to register horror or disdain. Professors in schools of education might shudder. Professional development gurus selling the latest fads in education would recoil. What would students say who try to win test retakes or extra time on exams? How do we deal with Adderall- or Ritalin-addicted students popping pills before the final exam?
As my friend and I commiserate with each other, we hope and pray that some of these issues do not affect our day schools. Maybe we are kidding ourselves. It hasn’t happened to me but I read about a teacher who was cursed at by a student and told by the principal to “have a classroom intervention” instead of calling the parent. How do teachers respond to students who take out their devices in the middle of class to check their texts, follow their feeds or update their status? (Fortunately I teach in a school that does not allow phones in the classroom.) I do not accept that Aristotle is a bully, or that high expectations are a sign of lacking empathy for students, that Donne is “problematic,” or that grammar is “unnecessary.”
I may not know how to teach students who are dogmatic about their skepticism and arrogant in their cynicism. My teaching career and that of my dinosaur colleagues stands juxtaposed to the central educational fiction of our time—mainly, that teacher compassion is equivalent to an endless softening of standards, of letting things slide, or equating poor behavior or subpar performance to “structural realities” or “systemic oppression.”
It seems to us ancient, thoughtful practitioners that compassion in the form of excuse-making is producing a generation of students who want the trophy without the excellence and the “A” without the effort. This is how you wind up with a generation that thinks wealth is a birthright and high achievement can be accomplished without effort.
Students today (according to many articles I have read) are wary of the unpleasant truth that the world respects those who are willing to grind, drudge and work their way towards a goal, even a modest one. Want a good grade? Don’t miss class, pay attention, and put in hours of studying. Want to be praised? Do something that is genuinely praiseworthy. Too often we see a system that is driven to create the illusion of education without the inconvenience of learning.
Has nihilism replaced diligence and dedication? Are these relics of a bygone era? This is how we arrive at a place where students can retake tests as many times as they want, a place where schools now have several valedictorians, a place where a student caught cheating during a test is likely defended rather than punished by his parent. This malaise may be infecting public schools. I hope this is not the case in our day schools.
I like to think that I was never about test scores and college admission, but inspiration. All teachers hope they will be perceived positively by their students. It seems from what I am reading, that some teachers want to be perceived as accommodating and nice, compassionate and infinitely empathetic. Academics means hard work. If done properly, students will someday be grateful not just for the lessons learned but how they were conveyed.
Dr. Wallace Greene has had a distinguished career as a teacher, administrator, and college professor.
