Teaching our children the why of work and the how to dream

 This week the principal in one of my schools is near tears. He came into a meeting and described what he saw in a classroom. And how it feels like nothing we have done seems to have made any difference.

Despite all the efforts to create a climate of change. Despite the counseling, tutoring, after school programs, parenting programs and commitment of more than 8 hour days put in by all the teachers the 8^th graders are failing. They are throwing pencils at the teacher, caught  up with drugs, ipods, cell phones, sometimes weapons, they are joining gangs and refusing to listen.

 Why? He wants to know.  What have we done wrong?How can we do better at teaching our children what they need to learn?How do we inspire them so that they will want to work?

 This week my oldest friend is visiting from Ohio. We shared the best teacher of our life and forty-four years later this teacher is still the greatest connection we have to each other.We can remember everything about him.And we are not the only ones.At a class reunion several years ago every one of our classmates shared the same experience of this 5^th grade teacher that we had thought was ours alone:That because of him we had felt uniquely talented.

 Mr. Doyle taught us how to think, and to make something real come out of these thoughts.He inspired us all to be writers. 

Before Mr. Doyle learning was a rote thing for us. But in Mr. Doyle’s class we did creative writing every day and turned this writing into  a business.We developed our own system of money, hired publishers, illustrators, and printers. We learned to make contracts with each other and the business grew.

 That was the year that learning and working became my passion.

I think about all of this now,  as the principal is near tears, and as I talk to my friend. How I first learned that my words and action could make a difference. And how, in this  time of recession/ depression, still I feel that passion has never left me.

 Maybe the changed world, or a world that we need to work to change, is still an abstract concept to these kids in our classrooms. Still  we must not forget, many of them are children of immigrants. Fragile economic realities surround them, with the pressures to perform,the demand for rising test scores, the precarious survival of their schools.

 Maybe the changed world is still far removed from our own children, our newly minted college graduates,to whom we provided with every opportunity,and now release into this world of shrinking resources.

We wonder: Do they take any job they can get?Live at home longer?Do we encourage them still to follow their passions? And why are they still hanging out in cafes, going to restaurants? Don’t they know we are in a new world, a world where it’s  no longer about money coming freely, or just for personal gain, no longer about taking anything for granted.

 Now everything comes around to this image under the water fall at the Yerba Buena Center, at the memorial for Martin Luther King,where the  words from the I Have a Dream speech are engraved.

 Because no matter what we do, now it really is up to our children to“face the difficulties of today and tomorrow…the fierce urgency of now.To make real the promises of democracy…"

It is up to our children to confront an America that “has defaulted on a promise…given a bad check, a check that has come back marked insufficient funds.” They are the ones who  must refuse to believe “that the bank of justice is bankrupt …that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity.”

 And finally, as the great orator so prophetically said all those years ago when  my friend and I were fifth grade students: "We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

 As Mr. Doyle taught, our children now must  learn how to think and to feel and to work again with passion. But above all, they must learn how to be human again,   without I-pods, cell phones  and computers for a moment, just  listening  and talking with each other, finding out that they tare   uniquely gifted human beings. That is when the change will come and we will know  the greatness of our classrooms and our country, and have true hope for  our future.