CLASS IS IN SESSION … What About the Children?
By Sharon C. Jenkins
Class in session has a unique meaning to me as an educator. I’ve been a teacher in some form or fashion for the last twelve years. Usually at this time in my life I am preparing to be the teacher, not the student. This year the roles have reversed. As an advocate for continuing education and life long learning, I am constantly reinvigorated when I pursue the possibility of increasing my intellectual capital. Discovering something new has always intrigued me. I will be a student forever because it allows me to possess new territories that increase my wealth as an individual as well as my contribution to the world around me. I owe it to the universe to be that metamorphic butterfly accenting my intellectual beauty with new ideas and new discoveries.
Yet as the Good Book states, “wisdom is the principal thing”, but it also states that all that capital without love is worth nothing. If I become wise for wisdom’s sake it leads to nothing but a portentous state of mind that serves no one but self. That’s why the student/teacher philosophy is a very important one. It humbles you and acknowledges the fact that you are not the final authority on anything.
Historically teachers have been held to a level of higher accountability, thus we sometimes put on the crown of self-importance, because we hold the power to mold and shape the world’s future, children. Perhaps we assume that position because of society’s current disposition on our value. We hold a higher responsibility for our scholastic achievement and delivery but we are rewarded with a salary that is a pittance to that of this nation’s corporate leaders and are saddled with student loans that take us a lifetime to remit.
Go figure, it is simply the way of the world, but should it be? Children are the foundation for a better world. When we get caught up in a capitalistic mindset, we leave their training and nurturing to others and disregard their importance. It opens the door for devaluing their contribution to our society. It leaves them as Little Red Riding Hood, open to the “wolves” of this world. Frankly, this probably explains the increase in child abuse and sex trafficking in our nation of underage minors. In the home, in the classroom, and in the boardroom we are not sufficiently “loving” our children. This recession is not only affecting us but it infects our children to live a life without hope.
“How do we change this?” you say? Let us propose that it can be changed with purposing in our hearts to love our children again as a nation like we love the pursuit of money. Then we will make the necessary investments in our education system that will freely render what they need to be adequately loved and “trained up in the way they should go.” Invest in their future and you will leave a harvest that will fix this nation’s woes that could not be mended by their predecessors. Invest in children and you are guaranteed a profitable harvest. “What does love have to do with it?” Everything!
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