Each Day: A Veteran Educator's Guide to Raising Children by Z. Vance Wilson

Author:Z. Vance Wilson [Wilson, Z. Vance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Academic Development, Administration, Counseling, Education, Leadership, Non-Fiction, School, Student Life
ISBN: 9781475827774
Google: __asDAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01KITFT6M
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

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The Philosopher’s Stone

I often remind my English students not to sell a word short. When this school’s third headmaster, Albert Lucas, asked his boys in the 1930s and 1940s what the word “service” implied, might they have thought of “military” service and then figured they had the measure of the word? Some of our fourth headmaster’s young scholars, because Charles Martin was an influential priest, might have decided upon “divine” service. Many young people today, I believe, would speak only of “community” service or “social” service. If any of us pigeonhole the concept of service, however, we do it an injustice. While at first blush a call to multiply the ways young people think of service might not seem that important, in this particular case a pigeonholed definition works against our ultimate goals for children.

Educators of my generation have tried to teach students with advantages of material goods and good health to share their goods with people who do not have the same advantages—the poor, the hungry, the blind, the infirm. The children of Israel were to let the produce of the land lie fallow every seventh year so that the poor shall eat. Christ says, “For when I was hungry, you gave me food.” We have tried to encourage social-mindedness by creating a required social service program and even making graduation contingent upon the requisite number of community service hours. The state of Maryland, in fact, legislates service hours for the young.

The paradoxes of a required social service program are glaring. We necessitate an action that by its very nature should be voluntary. In doing so we imply that it is not naturally voluntary. We also measure it by hours as if it were work for pay. And sometimes we teach a lesson we don’t intend. We might profess doing good service, for example, or being moral in our service, but unintentionally we signal to the students that the human interchange is only one way. We serve; they receive. We hand over the literal goods, but since the other person doesn’t have the same quantity of goods, that person can offer us nothing (except, perhaps, allowing him- or herself to be a projection for our sense of our own goodness). Thus the concept of charity, which in Middle English included in it the idea of fairness and equity—and still should—becomes complicated in the student’s mind with a handout, or more accurately, a hand down.

These paradoxes will not disappear. Whatever the political theories, true equity will never be a reality, nor will we ever lose the virtue of charity. Business gurus speak of “managing up” and “managing down.” We must teach that a broad understanding of service—down, level, or up, to be crude—enriches the narrower idea the phrase “community service” unfortunately has become.

The terrible events of the fall of 2001, for example, remind us that service should transcend the materialistic fault lines of our culture. The young people we teach witnessed and felt extreme suffering and

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