Teach the Children
Tonight I ask your indulgence. I want to share with you a stream of consciousness I experienced last March. Where I will begin, will not seem so connected to where I am going to end up, but trust me for a few moments – I promise this will not just be the random wanderings of my aging mind.
In March Audrey and I attended a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Village Square and the Tallahassee Democrat concerning gun issues as they relate to school safety. The conversation among the panelists ranged from what local schools do to insure school safety, to statistics on gun ownership, to what does the second amendment really mean, to how do we define exactly what IS an assault weapon. These were all useful topics, I am sure, but it was the clergy member of the panel – Reverend Brant Copeland – pastor of the First Presbyterian Church – who tried to steer the conversation away from the minutia of gun types, or parsing the meaning of the second amendment. He wanted the panel to engage in a larger conversation about the values we want our community to reflect. What is the kind of society we really want? From Pastor Copeland’s perspective, if we could have THAT conversation, then our policies on guns, the 2nd amendment, and school safety measures would become self evident. I agreed with him and thought he had nailed the problem – at least I thought he had until Audrey and I discussed the event over dinner afterwards.
Audrey has worked in varyious kinds of schools for a long time; often schools that serve deprived populations. When we lived in Philadelphia she was a school counselor for inner city Catholic schools, and here she works for FSU doing research that takes her into a wide range of schools, including many outside of Leon County. From my own work with b’nai mitzvah students as well as teaching the Confirmation class, I get insights into many of the Leon County schools. In a nutshell, our conversation led us to the conclusion that it our system of public education is the incubator for the next Adam Lanza – the young man who committed the mass murders at Stony Brook Elementary School in Connecticut. Why? Because our children are not being socialized properly. Our education system, instead of fostering well adjusted, morally cognizant, independent thinking and creative human beings, is producing an ever increasing population of automatons.
It begins in kindergarten. When I attended kindergarten, it was all about playing with others, listening to classic children’s stories, doing art projects – often very messy but with great latitude for creativity. The picture album I have of kindergarten shows a classroom with tables arranged in a rather random, jumbled fashion, lots of toys and art supplies. We dressed in costumes at Halloween and put on a Christmas play for our parents. (As an aside, yes, the fact I played Joseph in a Christmas play in 1959 did not seem to harm my Jewish identity) The only evaluation my parents received was a hand written letter by my teacher at the end of the school year, giving her observations on my growth as a whole person, academically, morally, and creatively. This was a public school in West Virginia, by the way – not exactly a bastion of liberal or far out educational philosophies. Our building was a two story brick affair built in 1892 complete with a bell tower. The bell was rung by pulling on a rope. In 3rd grade, if I got to school early enough my teacher would let me ring the bell. But our school ran on educational principles based on plain old commons sense. Kindergarten was where you got your first taste of the school experience, with a focus on creating a love of coming to school and learning how to get along with others.
Kindergartens today are often like the ones Audrey observed in Gadsden County last year. They are sad descendants of my quite happy experience. The children are ordered into neat rows. There is little or no play. The emphasis is on inculcating obedience and cramming a pre-determined set of facts into the children’s heads. There are 5 year olds having to take spelling tests. By second grade they look beaten, the love of school, of the experience of learning, is wrung out of them. This reflects a situation found in schools all over the country. Schools in deprived areas are more concerned with teaching the children to obey, to toe the line, as opposed to a real education that allows them to think, to create. Even in schools located in better areas, the emphasis on testing, the pressure by parents to have children reading and doing math at an ever younger age, is forcing educators to carry out educational policies that they admit are against recognized principles of child development.
Teachers now have less and less freedom to formulate how they wish to instruct their children. All that matters is to score higher on tests that determine the funding fate of the school. A catch 22 results. The lower the test scores, the less funding, the harder to supply a meaningful education for the children. As the budget gets squeezed tighter; art, music, and drama become eliminated from the schools. That means many children’s fates are doomed before they even start, because for many children it is the arts that provide the spark engaging them in the process of learning. So we have to wonder, who in the system is really thinking of the best interests of the children?
By now you might be asking, “What does this have to do with school safety?” My response is that there are no short term answers to preventing violent disasters in schools. Any policy, any law, any measure including posting guards at the doors, will not be an iron clad guarantee to prevent the next shooting. A far better use of our resources would be to construct an education system that fosters love of learning, provides basic skills, teaches basic morality, inculcates creativity and creative thinking AND provides an environment where children can play together, be children together and learn to interact with each other in positive, productive ways. By creating better, more emotionally healthy citizens, we reduce the prospects for the next mass shooting.
Yes, this will take a generation or two, but we need to focus on long term solutions, not short term reactions to the disaster of the moment. It will be hard, very hard, and it will take resources, but consider the consequences of turning away from our obligations to our children. Because I truly believe that the only way to create a better Jewish future, a better American future, a better human future, is to spare no expense, no effort to care for the most precious commodity we have – our children. For me, all other issues are secondary to what we do with our children, to caring for our children in a radically changing world.
Let’s look at the discussion about guns as an example. To me this whole conversation, about what sort should be legal, about what measures of gun control should be enacted, about who should be armed and when and where should concealed weapons be permitted – well – for me all of this is emblematic of a deeper problem. They are the symptoms of the disease, not the disease. The deeper problem is the disservice we do to our children by cheating them out of the education they deserve. The deeper problem is that troubled children go undetected, not getting the extra attention they need. The deeper problem is an unhealthy moral attitude.
Do you remember the shootings in Littleton, CO in April of 1999? On the 110th birthday of Adolf Hitler, two boys, members of an outcast group fascinated with white supremacy, entered Columbine High School and cruelly slaughtered or wounded 40 people. Police found bombs planted all over the school. In the aftermath, all the same questions were asked that we heard after the shootings last December at Stony Brook: How can we increase security at schools? Why are we not catching the signs of trouble in these students before they explode in violence? Why are we allowing our children to play violent video and computer games? Why don’t we have better gun control laws? And answers came from all of the same sources as this past December. Politicians, psychologists, the NRA and media pundits all had suggestions – most of them conflicting – as to what to do to stop the violence. But I believed that it was Pope John Paul II who correctly articulated the core of the problem back in 1999: “America has to provide its children with a moral vision.”
Moral vision – yes! And our own Jewish tradition, what we do here in Temple Israel can help provide moral vision. The Hebrew word for ethics, for morality is musar. The word means so much more than ethics, however. The meaning of musar is a combination of “morality,” “instruction,” and “discipline.” It appears 50 times just in the book of Proverbs. We learn the essence of the word in the very first chapter, “My son, hear the instruction (musar) of your father. Do not forsake the Torah of your mother.” As is the typical structure in Proverbs, each element in the first part of the verse has a corresponding element in the second. Here, musar is the equivalent of Torah. The moral instruction manual for Jews is the Torah. I could give a detailed sermon on all the aspects of Torah morality, but let me default to a summary given by Rabbi Hillel. The essence of Torah is to treat everybody else as you wish to be treated. The rest is a filling in of the details. The Jewish approach to living our morality through our actions is the example we can offer America today. It is our potential contribution to an American moral vision.
And our country desperately needs this. Today, in an America that celebrates instant individual gratification more than ever before, we need a moral vision. Today, in an America whose family structures are changing as never before, we need to a moral vision. Today in an America that is becoming more ethnically diverse than ever before, we need a moral vision. Today, in an America that is ever more divided and partisan, we need a moral vision.
But, we also need to understand the new America. I looked over a number of studies from the 2000 census as well as the 2010 census. There are interesting trends we need to think about. The percentage of single parent households is now well over 1 fourth of all families. The number of interracial families is rising. The number of same sex couples with children is rising. People are marrying later and having children later. There are more adopted children representing a more diverse international population. Within a few decades, America will be a majority minority country. That means less white Americans than all the other ethnicities combined. About 50 % of all marriages end in divorce. Depending on your perspective, one may or may not lament some of these statistics. Are they the signs of moral decline, or as just the new reality of a shifting world? To all of these demographic shifts I add one more reality; which I actually do lament – the increasing isolation of individuals from community as we become more infatuated and engrossed with our various electronic devices.
How do we start to construct a moral vision for America? First must come an acceptance of the ever increasing diversity that makes up our country. Whether it is ethnically, racially, religiously, sexually – let’s realize that the great strength and real beauty of this country has been its ability to absorb and create a great salad bowl for diversity. Along with accepting diversity is the recognition of responsibility to the community. We might all be different, but we have obligations to each other. The single greatest excess in this country is the focus on the self. We are too self absorbed, too disconnected from real human contact. I love my computer but it is not a substitute for human to human interaction. No matter how many friends I have on Facebook, they cannot replace the joy of being with real, live people in a vibrant community. Computers make it too easy to communicate only with those who occupy our personal ideological silos. So part of the moral vision must be fostering actual human community, and a sense of our obligations to that community. It is Pirkei Avot that teaches us “al tifros min ha tzibur,” “do not separate yourself from the community.
However, obligations to the community do not come at the expense of individual dignity. Every person has the right to develop into the best possible version of his or her self. So our moral vision for America must balance our responsibility to the community with our rights as individuals. Accompanying individual responsibility is the need to be active contributors to society. Our moral vision must not encourage sloth, but build a love of learning, work, creativity, and pride in real achievement. Finally, this moral vision must do away with the notion that being poor is some kind of moral or personal flaw. That particular perversion of the Protestant work ethic needs to be excised from American thought.
Now enter the schools. Where else can children be exposed to all the benefits of technology while in a community that does not sacrifice human contact? Where else can young minds be stimulated with ideas, with exposure to the arts, to music, to the rich cultural diversity of this country? Where else can children learn to just play well together – so that they end up playing well together as adults? Where else can children learn the skills they will need to be contributing members of society while achieving a sense of personal dignity?
The question is how to create schools that will achieve this. Well, they already exist, and at least one is present right here in Tallahassee – the school of Arts and Sciences. A significant number of children from this congregation are fortunate enough to attend SAS, and as I work with children for either b’nei mitzvah training or listen to them in Confirmation class, I constantly see the results of a loving and creative learning environment. My lament is this: why cannot every child have the same opportunity? Rather than pour money into countless wasteful programs, I believe no expense should be spared to create schools of excellence in every community.
Part of these resources needs to be for what some school officials call “resource officers.” These are trained professionals, outside of and in addition to guidance counselors, who can spot the troubled, outcast child, and work with him or her. This professional would be engaged with families, attentive to domestic difficulties, and provide resources to parents. The guidance counselors present in many schools are far too few and overburdened to provide these services to their school’s population.
If one looks at the countries with the most successful school systems; schools that achieve the best outcomes for their students, there are some commonalities American schools need to adopt. These two countries are South Korea and Finland. In some ways they are radically different from each other – yet two key elements are the same. First, all education begins with the teacher. These countries pay teachers on a level that attracts the best and brightest to the profession. Teachers in many parts of America (I include Florida) are underpaid. The Democrat recently reported that starting teacher salaries are now around 35 K. After 15 years a teacher will make 40 K. Am I alone in asking what bright young teacher would be motivated to stay in teaching 15 years only to earn 5 K more? I am appalled by how little we value teaching as a profession. As a result, too many of our teachers are mediocrities who cannot even speak proper English. Audrey heard one last year tell her class, “Let’s sound out the word air-o-plane” actually breaking the word into 3 syllables! Let’s elevate the teaching profession AND provide means to remove non performing teachers, instead of protecting mediocrity and buying young teachers in bulk on the cheap. Second, every child learns the same material. No child in the United States should be held hostage educationally by the whims of ignorant local school boards. The school board of Kansas should not have the right to deny science and the state of Texas should not have the right to edit history. Third, full programs of art, music and drama should be part of every school’s curriculum. Often children having difficulties with standard subjects find their key to learning in the arts.
I know what you are thinking – these are pipe dreams and we do not have the money to make them happen. To that I have two answers. First, the money to educate is already in our system. We have just prioritized badly. Second, we need not wait for politicians to wake up and make changes. We can begin to do this ourselves. How? We can actively lobby for education reform, locally and at the state. We can become involved in local schools as mentors, as volunteers – offering our time to help care for our children. Think you do not have time? Think you are too busy? Well, in Philadelphia, center city professionals dedicate part of their day to tutoring inner city children who need academic help. A few years back I saw a wonderful picture of a 6 year old African American boy sitting on the desk of a prominent center city lawyer – each with a reading primer in hand. In Yonkers, a number of policemen have taken special training and tutor elementary school children after regular hours. The purpose is manifold. Not only do the kids get academic help, they learn that these uniformed figures are people to be trusted. At the same time the policemen are on the alert for children who seem troubled, and cue the teacher or principle to their needs.
The real question is this: how willing are we to get involved in caring for our children? Here is why I decided to speak about this tonight, our tradition, Jewish tradition, does not shirk from our obligations to our children, or to their education. The Talmud teaches, “Reish Lakish said, ‘The world endures only for the sake of the breath of school children.’” Think about that. Reish Lakish believes God keeps things going because of the hope each new generation of children represents. But another rabbi, Rav Papa objected and asked this question, “What about mine and yours?” Reish Lakish then replied, “Breath in which there is sin is not like breath in which there is no sin.” We adults are already tainted with prejudice, with bad habits, with rigid perspective. Untainted children represent our chance to repent and get it right – if only we teach them. Reish Lakish then continues, “School children may not be made to neglect their studies even for the building of the Temple.” Remember that the studies being referred to include religious and moral studies. The rabbi is saying that even the grandeur of the Temple, takes a back seat to the hope a new generation of children represents. Their education trumps everything, even constructing the most prominent religious structure of their day.
Twice a day a Jew prays the words v’shinantam levanecha, “teach them to your children.” “Them” is the words of Torah. They are words of history. They are words of morality. They are words of hope. They are words law. They are words of righteousness. They are words of desire. They are words of prayer. Join with me now as we pray for our children.
Adapted from Berachot 17a
May you live to see your world fulfilled,
May your instruction prepare you for your future,
And may you trust ingenerations past and yet to be.
May your heart ponderand achieve understanding,
And your words be filled with insight.
May songs of praise ever be uponyour tongue
Andyour vision be on astraight path before you.
May your eyes shine with the light of holy words
And your face reflect the brightness of the heavens.
May your lips speak wisdom,
And your fulfillment be in righteousness
As you run wholeheartedly to seek the will of God.
The Jewish Observer 
Now THAT’S a sermon! Wow!