Education: A Spiritual Challenge

This week, both The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek have articles about the awful, sticky, supremely difficult problem of educating America’s children, especially the ones who are functioning below grade level.
    What a horrendous spiritual lapse!  How can it be that  America, the Land of Opportunity, has no idea how to teach its children?  How can we have abandoned our young people to such a degree?  The way things stand now, if you grow up in a middle-class home, you’ll probably get a good education.  If you grow up in a poor home, and—like Justice Sonia Sotomayor—you have dedicated, strong-willed mentors, you may get a good education.  Otherwise, it’s like a throw of the dice.
    Back when I was racing through a quick-teacher-preparation program at the State College at Boston, I noticed that no one was teaching me how to teach.  The practice-teaching portion of the program had ten of us taking turns teaching a summer school class of fifth-graders.  The instructors simply watched us present lessons we amateurs had invented by ourselves.  The more poster-board displays we stayed up late painting, the higher the student-teaching grades we received.
    The problem continued as I proceeded through my teaching career, through old math and new math and back to old math, through see-and-say, phonics, and combined methods.  I was on my own inventing ways to get the ideas across.  Fellow teachers with more years behind them helped.  But they were just telling me what they had tried and found useful.  None of us was operating from a scientific body of knowledge.  
    When I switched from teaching elementary school to teaching high school science, I still had to invent approaches as I went along, getting better with experience, but still flying by the seat of my pants.
    At last, some dedicated educators are trying to solve this problem.  They are in touch with their own spiritual paths, and, lucky for America, those paths cross the paths of America’s schoolchildren.
    Let me know your thoughts about this problem.  I’ll have more to say about it in my next post.