This Business of Teaching

I often muse, especially as Final Exams give me the time to, on how wasteful it is for us to attempt to foster education on those that have no wish to attain it. The labor and sweat that one person expends to apply facts and figures that most of them will stubbornly refuse to accept or take seriously, because they aren't there by choice. It seems counter-productive, this expectation that everyone must be made a scholar when so few of them are destined for that role.


All of which might seem to be an argument for Education as the Creation of Enduring Knowledge, but that itself seems but synonymous with Learnin' Fer Dummies. In my fondest hopes, I would like to save learning for those that want it, and let those that want it not make their own way in the world. But to suggest such has merely become a cue for gasps. Why, condemn them to a life of ignorance and poverty? It Can Not Be!


But it is, whether we will it or not. I teach at a private school that sends a substantial number of its graduates to a glorified community college, some because they want to slum off the cost of college for a few years, many because they're too provincial to want anything else and hence deliberately too ignorant to get it. Is it a greater travesty to mark them as the dullards they wish to be, with appropriate consequences in life, or to gussy them up in robes and hand them diplomas earned more by the sleight-of-hand of faculty than their own academic achievement?


I myself and bored with seeing uncouth morons passed off as fine young Christian men and women. The hypocrisy sickens me. I play the game for one week more, and then I come back cruel. Next year will be the Season of the F.