TO DO OR TO BE

 During this election season, there has been little talk about education, perhaps our country’s most challenging and most enduring problem. If education is mentioned, it seems to float around in terms of how many millions or billions and not get at the heart of the matter. Voters need to know exactly what that money is spent for. Such costs as school busses and hot lunches we take for granted, but what exactly do the teachers offer?

 When I learn that a young person wants to prepare to be a teacher, I want to shake his shoulders and scream at him to study the liberal arts first. Today we have two kinds of degrees, one that teaches you how to do something and one that teaches you how to live. Perhaps you can earn a degree in basket weaving and you may earn a satisfactory salary. (I really mean wages.) But such a degree does not teach you how to live. It takes the liberal arts for that. And what are they?  

 The liberal arts are (in alphabetical order) architecture, art, ballet, drama, language (foreign and your own), history, literature, music, philosophy and religion. It isn’t that you learn how to design a cathedral, or to preach sermons, or write the great American novel, but you learn about them, appreciate them, support them, discuss them and they enrich your life. When you are teaching third graders you might tell them the story of Narcissus from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water (as a matter of fact, just yesterday I heard the word “narcissist” as a description of one of the presidential candidates. How nice to know what the speaker meant.) Then there is Procrustees from mythology who cut off the legs of visitors whose legs were too long for his beds. Of course, I do not mean the third graders should necessarily hear the entire myth with possibly gory details, but just the heart of the story.

 When I was in the lower grades in Tennessee, the superintendent of schools, Mr. James, paid us the occasional visit when all six grades gathered to hear the story he told us. He had a great gift of telling stories and I remember hearing Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face” without any horror in it. He was there on business, I suppose, but he took time to tell us a wonderful story every time he visited us. He had a business job to do, but he knew something of the Arts too. He was showing us how to live.

 I once knew a high school drill instructor who bragged that she had not read a book since she was in school, whatever level she meant. When I quizzed her about the literature we all studied in high school at the time, she could not identify any Dickens character, or name a Shakespeare comedy. How could anyone forget Madame Defarge? Or Silas Marner? Or Elizabeth Bennet? Or Heathcilff? Or Lady Macbeth? Or Hamlet? And if you know these characters they must have taught you something to live by. This may be different with each person. But it certainly does depend on the quality of the teacher. I knew a teacher who started a phonograph record to play Julius Caesar and left the room for the duration. You don’t leave a class of tenth-graders alone with Shakespeare! You teach Shakespeare and don’t depend upon an unsupervised recording to do that for you. You stand there and stop the machine to explain what the bard meant.

 But literature is only one of the liberal arts. I have a special affinity for it, of course, but I know something about all the fields of liberal arts. It's almost safe to say that all the subjects of the arts are related to each other, but it might be difficult to convince someone of the kinship between architecture and ballet, but  if one studies the two fields deeply enough, the relationship will probably turn up.

 Before any young person enters the study program in Education (to become a teacher), I suggest he spend at least two years in the study of the Liberal Arts. It can make all the difference. You will enjoy life more and learn how to live it.