When it comes to elucidating my education philosophy, I would have to start by hauling out the speech I make to my yearbook students the first day of every school year. Among other things, I tell them about entropy, that force of nature that resists the order we attempt to impose on our world. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, as Yeats once put it. Before they embark on such a perilous adult enterprise as daring to publish their work for a paying audience (who isn't paying them), they should know of the land mines and booby traps that the universe lays out for the unsuspecting. Order can be maintained, I say to them, but only through a constant application of energy. One kind of energy is the good old physical kind: labor, electricity, and so on. The other kind is inside their heads. |
The famous equation we associate with the theory of relativity—E=mc squared—speaks as much to the potential of the human mind as to the atoms around us. A consciousness that can encompass such a concept as relativity, introduced in nearly the same year as humankind first took flight, and project itself to the moon and back in the span of a lifetime later is the foremost wonder of the universe. If human beings can do these things, I tell my students, why surely we can put a book together in the space of six months that people will enjoy. And in this respect I discover I am a hopeless romantic. On occasion I come to think too many students seem inoculated against this infectious idea, that all human progress springs from the knowledge that every moment is an opportunity to gain something from the world for ourselves and those with whom we inhabit it. |
I count myself among the acolytes of American education pioneers Horace Mann and John Dewey, in that I believe a quality education is the inherent right of all and that education is inevitably a positive social force. Unless I am quite ill, or traveling with students to our yearly journalism conventions, I am in the classroom every day, attempting to lead by the example that my presence makes a difference. Being there for students day after day is my method of “lowering” the student to teacher ratio to the point that my students expect the best from me and eventually themselves. I applaud both private and home schooling for showing how a low student to teacher ratio works. However, on the principle that they are simply a means to instigate a brain drain on public education, I am against publicly funded vouchers. |
