For Everything There is a Season

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/21/21

            If Grant and Lee could show deep respect for each other at Appomattox and if the rabid abolitionist Horace Greeley could pay Jefferson Davis’ bail, Americans today should be able to handle their political/social differences peacefully.

            But today is not a season to talk about peace. In fact, it’s time to fight. Since violence has moved to the suburbs, if an evil man with ill intentions enters my house at 3:00 AM, it’s time to fight. On a much broader scale, if domestic forces bent on transforming America continue their onslaught on America’s values and heritage, it’s time to fight those forces as well.

            The war for what America will be like within the next quarter century has been waged. It’s clear that freedom of expression is being limited like never before, thanks to the government, the media, corporations, social media moguls, the university, and now, medical authoritarianism. Regarding the latter, anyone who dares listen to any medical researchers who disagree with Dr. Fauci is considered absolute nuts. Never have Americans been as subservient as now. Never have we allowed ourselves to be so browbeaten and so driven to one perspective without allowing other perspectives voice. Never has rejection of establishment wisdom gotten us fired.

Will America, then, remain the beacon of freedom and the example of prosperity-producing economics to the rest of the world?  Is she allowing her heritage of individual liberty to be aborted by the false gods of safety and unchallenged bureaucratic wisdom? Consider the following areas in which America has slipped, largely because those who don’t like America have chosen to diminish her and blame her for sins which she long ago acknowledged, addressed, and sought to repair.

            Our nation is now being undermined by what writer Irving Kristol called “the adversary culture.” Trading liberty for safety, college students around the country are arguing against freedom of speech, opting instead for “safe speech.” Un-chastised by their stockholders, corporations have become social activists, taking positions on everything from bathrooms to race to sexual identity. We’ve all heard the expression, “Shut up and sing.” Corporations need to shut up and make money. But somehow they have become the arbiters of social justice and “sexual freedom.” You know, the transgender/binary gender/choose your own pronoun foolishness, not to mention all the corporate support given to the riot-loving Black Lives Matter organization.  

The media, abdicating their role of providing news, have become the Commentariat. The medical profession that knows better but won’t say so, yields to the nonsense of asking on its paper work for one’s “sexual identity.” Many schools that should be teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic are delving deeply into ideology, telling children and youth alike what to think, particularly about race. As for the military, what more needs to be said about its departure from its purpose than to quote the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley: “I’d like to learn more about white rage and believe our troops should as well”? 

In sports, team owners allow spoiled 20-something-year-old millionaires to disrespect the flag and put down the country that, for Heaven’s sake, allowed them to get rich in the first place.  In short, craziness abounds.

            And that’s why fighting is in order. If a major political party will so agreeably yield to its fringe that calls into question capitalism, free speech, free enterprise, and love of country, the nation’s future is bleak unless that party is denied leadership and unless ordinary citizens do certain things. The Tea Party was successful. America needs another such effort.

            What can be done? There are many things deplorable, God-fearing, America-loving, hardworking, taxpaying citizens can do, and all of them will require not so much time or effort as simply the willingness to disturb our busy lives. Here are some: vote for sure; call or write your elected officials to tell them what you think; warn/teach your children not to follow the crowd and to question their teachers or professors whenever they teach something contrary to what they were taught at home; join and/or give money (small donations add up) to organizations that hold to your beliefs including political parties; speak up more whenever social or political topics are brought up.

            Finally, be inspired by the great poem, “Be Strong,” by Maltbie Davenport Babcock: “Be strong / We are not here to play, to dream, to drift / We have hard work to do and loads to lift / Shun not the struggle, face it / ‘Tis God’s gift. / Say not, ‘The days are evil. Who’s  to blame?’ and fold the hands and acquiesce / Oh shame! / Faint not, fight on / Tomorrow comes the song.”

            Yes, fight we must.

 

Roger Hines

8/19/21

               

 

Roger Hines

8/19/21

 

                       Questions for the First Day of School

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/7/21

            Welcome, class, to the course on Contemporary America. You understand that to be educated is to know how things came to be as they are. Not all things, but at least those ideas/theories, people/movements, issues/controversies, and discoveries/events that have most significantly affected us.

            Let’s deal with some questions that all of us should care about. You give me your questions; I’ll give you my short answers which you can either entertain or ignore. Who has questions?

            Question 1: Is a populist revolution really occurring in America? Answer: Yes. Populist means “of the people.” Typically the word refers to the work-based, faith-driven citizens of America. Broadly, it means the middle class but more precisely it is both manual laborers and professionals, blue collars and white collars alike who, in the words of columnist Salena Zeto, have been “hidden in plain sight.” If the “silent majority” doesn’t quite fit them, we can certainly call them constitutionalists, pragmatists, and localists. In other words they want government to be limited, competent, and close to home. They are voters who in 2016 fought successfully for their cherished American ideals and won. Interestingly enough they basically come from the interior states, not the two coasts. Though they lost the 2020 presidential election, they are reshaping American politics by rightly questioning or ignoring the media and by speaking up more on all issues.

            Question 2: What is it about Critical Race Theory that the populists don’t like? Answer: Almost everything. I say almost because CRT does start with the basic truth that in America’s past, slavery and segregation were despicably wicked. But CRT adherents see racism in the heart of every white person. (It doesn’t matter that whites elected and re-elected a black president.) One of its founders, Kimberly Crenshaw, wrote, “CRT aims to revitalize traditional race consciousness.” A la Calvinism, CRT claims all whites are predestined to be racists. CRT, then, is white supremacy in reverse and yes, “the people” are standing firmly against it.

            Question 3:  Why do so many populists either question or totally dismiss all of the talk about climate change? Answer: Populists don’t always agree on this question, but consider this. Remember the term “global warming”? Why do you suppose it has been dropped? I mean, Al Gore received a Nobel Prize in 2007 for his advocacy of global warming. Uh-oh. That same year the International Climate Conference predicted that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. However in 2010 the Conference reported its own errors, asserting that this melting would not happen then.

            On a personal note, my father kept a diary from 1941 to his death in 1979. For every single day of that 38-year period (the Conference’s projection was for a 28-year period) my farmer father recorded the high and low temperature. From the diaries I possess and the others I have checked, summer temperatures were essentially the same throughout those nearly four decades . Also, in 2009 the United States experienced extremely frigid weather in February. So, since the global warming theory is void of scientific validation, let’s just say that its believers have nervously opted for a softer term, one that’s presumably more easily swallowed: “climate change.” Feel the softness.

            Question 4: You said that populists are “faith-driven.” What does that say about populists and the culture wars? Answer: Plenty. Not all populists are people of faith and neither is fake news limited to politics. For instance, consider the myth of the dying church. Check out Glenn Stanton, director of Global Family Formation Studies (global family here refers to the universal Christian church, not to “we are the world” feel good-ism). His 2019 research indicates that “conservative Biblical churches are holding strong while liberal churches are hemorrhaging members” and that “young adult attendance at Biblically faithful churches is at a 50-year high.”

            As for culture broadly, yes, the nation is awash in junk culture. Do I need to mention Hollywood’s moral drivel, ubiquitous erotic fiction (listening, Stacy Abrams?), uninspiring, even filthy music, homeless-looking dress, anti-Americanism, or increasing profanity? Even great patriot Sen. Ted Cruz cannot talk five minutes without saying “Damn” and “What the hell.” Yes, figuratively and sometimes literally (check out the name Rod Dreyer) some populists are pulling out of the culture. I beg you not to.

            Question 5: What’s happened to the Durham Report? Answer: The WHAT? Ohhh … you mean the investigation of the DOJ’s counterintelligence operation against the 2016 Trump campaign. Don’t waste your time waiting for it. There are other hills to die on.

            Oops!  The bell. Let’s pick up there tomorrow. Don’t be discouraged. You’re not alone in the fight, but fight you must.

 

Roger Hines

August 5, 2021 

 

           

           

           

 

                                A Slam and a Sham

          Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/31/21

            Yet another slam and sham is in the make. The Congressional committee to investigate the January 6 “insurrection” is called to order. But first some essential background.

            For three months in the summer of 2020 – May 24 to August 22 – Democrat mayors, governors, and members of Congress sat like contented frogs while looting, rioting, burning, and total destruction of livelihoods took place in at least 8 major cities. Violence in city streets surged to new levels. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), more than 10,000 demonstration events occurred across the nation.

            One 2020 summer evening I watched as CNN’s Ali Velshi stood in Minneapolis in front of burning automobiles, crumbling buildings, and thieving looters and declared that “protestors have not become unruly.” My jaw hit the floor. Had the scene not been so horribly destructive, Velshi’s claim would have been laughable.

            Equally incredulous was the shameful characterization of Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan who dubbed the nationwide riots a “summer of love.” Her comparison of the summer of 2020 to the summer of 1969 and the Woodstock Festival of Love was not humorous. Mayor Durkan even cheered the Black Lives Matter organization and other neo-Marxist revolutionaries who set up their CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) and declared it a secession. On June 29^th protestors marched to Durkan’s home to protest for even deeper cuts in police funding. Perhaps alarmed that angry protestors had come to her front door, Durkan on July1 launched an offensive on the protestors and the dismantling of CHAZ began.

            On Father’s Day weekend in the City of Fatherlessness (Chicago), 104 people were shot. Fourteen people were killed, including 5 children. In San Francisco, Velshi’s “unruly protestors” used the holiday to tear down more memorial monuments, those of President U.S. Grant and Francis Scott Key. Neo-Marxists aren’t just after Confederates. They’re after the American way, which is to say constitutionalism, federalism, and capitalism. In other words they’re socialists.

            It came to pass that in 2021 on January 6^th skullduggery hardly equal to and certainly no greater than that of 2020 took place at the nation’s Capitol. No, the nation’s Capitol is no more to be revered than the store fronts of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and New York. No, the well suited elected officials inside the Capitol are no more to be revered than the displaced small business owners and employees – the little people, so to speak – of those cities. And no, the work of the suits inside the Capitol is no more to be revered than that of the unknown, burned out “summer of love” victims who were simply making a living. Yet, we’re to believe that storied columns, paintings of politicians, and history-besotted halls and chambers are more honor-worthy than America’s workbench. Talk about elitism. Jefferson himself, an intellectual and leader extraordinaire, would have been repulsed by such self-importance.

            The political party that chose to ignore the “summer of love” is now turning its attention to the goons who dared to smash their hallowed building and interrupt their most honored tasks. Makes one wonder whether or not all the smashed Moms and Pops of 2020 are still dealing with insurance companies or whether or not they have somehow made it back to solvency.

            The Committee on the January 6^th “Insurrection” should reach for a dictionary.  An insurrection is a formal, intentional seizure whose purpose is to take control of a government. So which of the clowns storming the Capitol was to be the President? What plans had been made regarding takeover of America’s military? Was there a modern cavalry waiting outside of D.C. in case they were needed? Now things are getting laughable. By day’s end the destructive buffoonery was over. Would that business owner victims of 2020 could have had it so easy.

            Democrats know this was no insurrection. They know that the vast majority of those in attendance at the Trump rally on January 6 went home. No, they’re fearfully thinking Donald Trump must be slammed, not really for the fictitious “insurrection,” but for winning the hearts of 74 million Americans. Thus, the Committee. Thus, the sham crocodile tears of the committee members, male and female, that began to flow shortly after the committee convened on Tuesday.

            Dear reader, is it not time that ordinary citizens protest against the perpetual craziness that surrounds us? Has an alarm not sounded? Should Jefferson have sought common ground with King George? Should Churchill have sought to convince Hitler to be a good boy? No, these leaders knew that defeat of the enemy was a total necessity. So must we view those who today are trying to destroy a former president and to “re-imagine” America.

 

Roger Hines

7/28/21 

 

                                     Twenty Fifty-six?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/17/21

            We can hardly fault writer George Orwell for getting the exact date wrong. The important point is that Orwell was right about the emergence of Big Brother, Orwell’s name for the impending governmental tyranny that the entire world faced.

In his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written barely four years after Europe was delivered from the Nazi nightmare, Orwell warned that Hitler’s efforts at European domination would not be the last. Other anti-freedom personalities and efforts would rise and the demise of civilization would be certain. Orwell posited that in 35 years totalitarianism would swallow the West if not the entire world.

  But the year 1984 has come and gone. Americans, Europeans, and certain Asians are still voting and selecting their leaders. Furthermore 1984 found America with a president who throughout his presidency warned the nation about intrusive government. That brave president stood in a divided city in the divided nation of Germany, alas, and spoke with anger to the Soviet ruler, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall.”

What, then, shall we make of Orwell’s prophetic pen and his dire warnings about “Party doctrine” and superstates? Was Orwell wrong? Indeed not. Since the publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the world has endured Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Tito, Franco, Batista,  Castro, Kaddafi, Hussein, and many a petty tyrant in Central America and Africa. “Man would be free,” wrote Rousseau, “but is everywhere in chains.”

 If Orwell were alive – he died in 1950 – he would still be alarmed. Ironically, he claimed he was a socialist, but wrote often of socialism’s “dangerous ends.” What Orwell addressed most was how bureaucracy and language affect freedom. He argued that tyranny doesn’t always come from traditional tyrants. It was Orwell who introduced the terms “newspeak” and “thought crime.” (You know, “hate crime” legislation, punishing people for what they think, not what they do.) Exploring how corrupt language can be used to advance political oppression, Orwell stressed the connection between language, thought, and power.  

Can we not see how language is used today to hide agendas? Can we not recognize tricky semantics? How did most of us define infrastructure before Biden became president? Can a Black person be a racist? How is it that progressives define free speech so differently from how the liberal “tell it like it is” college youths of the sixties defined it? What is “reproductive freedom” but weasel words?

Today we are awash in a language revolution. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “All revolutions are doctrinal. You cannot upset things unless you believe something outside them.”

And what do the America-haters believe? They believe (or do they really?) that American civilization began in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves rather than 1776 with the shedding of patriot blood. They believe Al Sharpton and Stacey Abrams rather than Martin Luther King, Alveta King, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Hershel Walker, Clarence Thomas and thousands of other Blacks who competed and succeeded rather than hiding behind the color of their skin and claiming victimhood. Like the Islamic group, ISIS, they believe that history and monuments they don’t like should be canceled. Their inability to name another country they prefer belies their true motives.

America-haters are driving us toward the realization of Orwell’s prophecy. They are proving Orwell’s declaration that it doesn’t take dictators to effect a revolution. Re-defining and “re-imagining” will do the job, especially if you involve children and youth. Hence, Critical Race Theory (a Calvinistic-like notion that tells schoolchildren all Whites are necessarily born racist), Defund the Police, the incredulity of “a third gender,” a doomed burning earth, government-encouraged snitching, and a Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who believe it’s dandy to require the indoctrination of our troops with Critical Race Theory. Who needs a dictator for revolution when you can ease it in through bureaucratic edict, schools, the military, and oh yeah, our transnational, radicalized, customer base be-damned corporations who ought to stick to making money?

There’s another problem. More and more good, ordinary Americans are choosing security over freedom. Forgetting that scientists and “experts” of all stripes often disagree vehemently with each other, they’re letting fear-mongers control them. Such is the evil power of influence about which Orwell wrote.

Americans had better wake up before November of 2022, acknowledge which political party has fostered the ongoing revolution, and vote accordingly.

Orwell predicted freedom would die within 35 years. Thank God, he was wrong. Dare we allow another 35 years to pass (2056), to find that our kids and grandkids are living under Orwellian Big Brother dystopia? If we do, Jefferson, Madison, and 1.4 million American soldiers labored and died in vain.

 

Roger Hines

7/15/21

 

                                       I Was There and CNN Got it Wrong

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/3/21

            Leaving the Music City Center in Nashville, TN two weeks ago, my wife and I along with long lines of literally thousands of other Southern Baptists paused at the first street corner to wait for the walk signal. Only a few yards away from the curb were five men bearing a Black Lives Matter banner and blaring over their microphone, “Southern Baptists are racists and hypocrites.”

            I wish that the five men had been inside the vast convention hall where the Southern Baptist Convention had just wrapped up its annual meeting. I wish they could have seen the Black singers, Black preachers, and Black speechmakers, particularly Pastor Fred Luter, the first Black president of the SBC (2012-2014) as he nominated for President the candidate who was elected.

            More importantly I wish the profane, accusatory men could have seen 15,726 Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico slip from their chairs, kneel uncomfortably in limited space, and pray for each other, the nation, and the world. It might also have been of interest to the five protestors, though maybe not, to hear from two of the six SBC seminary presidents that their seminary enrolments are now over 50% non-Anglo.

            Any way you cut it, church is sociology. Birds of a feather flock together. Even so, Southern Baptists for some time now have been convicted that their congregations and  denominational gatherings should look more like heaven is going to look: “saints from all the nations.”

             Americans have always been a religious people. Churches are everywhere, 47,000 of which are Southern Baptist. Hospitals, schools, colleges, orphanages, and rehab centers have been built and funded by America’s church goers of all denominations. It’s indisputable that wherever the Christian faith has gone schools and hospitals have followed. (Full disclosure: I have not researched to find out how many schools and hospitals have been built by American Atheists or the Atheist Alliance.)

Southern Baptists, with over 14 million members, are still the largest Protestant group in America. Like other Protestants and Catholics, Southern Baptists often disagree with each other. Much has been made of a “split,” “division,” and “turmoil” amongst Southern Baptists. Don’t believe it. Never has there been an annual meeting without internal disputed issues. The Nashville gathering, however, was a typical prayer-bathed business meeting and a time of worship. The new president, Pastor Ed Litton of Saraland, Alabama and his losing opponent, the silver-tongued orator/seminary president/activist Al Mohler evidenced their grace and Christian charity with respectful words for each other.

            On the evening just after Litton was elected president, he appeared on CNN’s Erin Burnett show. Gleefully, Burnett gave the setup: “The Southern Baptist Convention has just elected a moderate as their president. He’s coming right up.” Right up, though, Litton kindly but forcefully corrected Burnett. “I’m not a moderate. I’m a theological conservative.” Burnett, visibly stunned, wrongfully suggested that because Litton has spoken out for racial reconciliation and works with a multiracial group of pastors in the Mobile area, he must not represent the rank and file. How insulting.

            Litton’s defense of his conservative creds brought to my mind the fact that as much as Southern Baptists and other evangelicals disagree with each other at times, they are all strong on the fundamentals of the faith: the virgin birth, the sinless life, the substitutionary/sacrificial death, and the literal resurrection, not to mention Christ’s great commission to share the Gospel. That’s why some refer to Southern Baptists as Great Commission Baptists.

The SBC is a voluntary fellowship of “co-operating” churches. It is totally non-hierarchical and each church is totally autonomous. To refer to “problems within the SBC” is absolutely vague and misleading, though individual churches certainly do often have problems.

            Interviewed by the National Review, Litton stated, “The SBC did not inch left. My views of marriage, gender identity, and homosexuality have not changed nor are they going to change. They’re bound by Scripture and there I stand.”

            The Wall Street Journal also got it wrong: “The SBC is at war. Internal fissures have exploded.” No, and no, Donald Trump has not divided the denomination, as the WSJ foolishly suggested. Newsweek, CBS, and ABC also joyfully celebrated the supposed “leftward turn” that Litton himself has denied.

            This stir will not stop evangelicals from spreading the Gospel or from speaking out on social issues. Keeping quiet on abortion, injustice, perversion and moral degeneracy would dishonor the cries of the Old Testament prophets;    the Methodist, William Wilberforce; the Lutheran, Dietrich Bonheoffer; and two great Baptists, Martin Luther King and Billy Graham.

            I doubt that the Great Commission Southern Baptists will ever keep quiet and I pray that they won’t.

 

Roger Hines

July 1, 2021

 

             

 

    We’re All Vagabonds Now and my Father Would Disapprove

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 6/20/21

            No one ever loved their parents more than I loved mine. Both of them worked incredibly hard, my father loving the fields he labored in and my mother preferring the fields with him over housework and cooking. Growing up, I saw my older sisters doing most of the housework while our mother, when not battling kidney stones, was in the fields or huge gardens.

            My father had a high school education which at the time of his graduation in 1910 meant only 11 years of study. The extension to 12 years would come a few years later. My mother made it through the seventh grade. She could read but always had a problem with words that were beyond the “junior high” level. More than once she handed me a magazine or a newspaper to ask how to pronounce a word. More than once she gave up and said, “Why don’t you just read it to me?”

Those times and moments were as precious to me then as they are in my memory now. Teen culture was coming into its own at the time which was the late 1950s. The Four Aces and Perry Como were waning. Elvis and Little Richard were taking over. I enjoyed them all but I was never cool and didn’t want to be. My dear, aging parents who struggled persistently and nobly were my anchor. President Eisenhower was smiling down on the nation and his successor, the young and cultured JFK, afforded the nation an example of class and self-respect.

But something was happening, something that continues to this day if in fact it has not been completed. I’m referring to the loss, or should I say the abandonment, of the cultured life. I know, the very words “the cultured life” sound uppity and pretentious. They remind us perhaps of royalty and social snobbery. But there are other perceptions.

Throughout human history culture has referred to entire civilizations such as Western culture. Today we often speak of sub-cultures such as Southern culture or the drug culture. Pro-lifers often refer to the abortion industry as a culture of death. In short, the word is used widely and differently.

In spite of their station in life my parents qualified for placement with those who sought and lived a cultured life. I base this claim on the definition of culture supplied by the 19^th century British writer Matthew Arnold who still maintains his place in English literature textbooks. Arnold defined culture as an ideal, that being “the best which has been thought and said.” Culture, Arnold asserted, “has its origins in the love and study of perfection.”

 Both of my parents had standards for language, dress, and conversation. You don’t use ugly words. You dress your best and “never go to town looking like a hank” (whatever that word meant).  Also, in conversation you “never talk about people.” That meant don’t gossip or speak unkindly of others.

My father’s bent for perfection extended to the sharpening of hoes, the storing of tools, the straight placement of anything on the mantle, the wearing of ties and “Sunday pants” to church even in the hottest of summers, and enough “hair oil” to control the most stubborn head of hair. My mother was cultured in a different way. Her personal culture personified kindness,  the deepest, unconditional love for her children, and the expert use of the switch whenever it was needed. Neither of my parents gave the word culture a thought and probably never heard of Matthew Arnold, but they still honored his claim that anyone who says he is cultured certainly is not.

The decline of culture in America today is serious. The same is true of Europe. This is not true, we are told, of Asian nations. But here in our homeland, men’s hairy legs and flip-flops are as common in church as white shirts were in 1955. Use of filthy language grows by the day. Social media and politics have no rules at all. We’re all doing that which seems right unto ourselves, including dressing like we’re homeless vagabonds. Where I grew up even the poorest of the poor had more self-respect.

And why does this matter? It matters because like it or not, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” John Donne was referring to humanity, not government.

Cancel culture is another term we’re using these days. Seems to me culture itself is being canceled, at least the kind that my mother and father pursued. Father’s Day is a good time to start canceling our carelessness and engaging in some profitable nostalgia. We would all be happier.

 

Roger Hines

6/14/21 

 

                     Let Not Many Be Teachers, Or Coaches

               Published in Marietta (GA)Daily Journal, 6/5/21

This column was first printed in May of 2017. In light of COVID and the challenges teachers have faced the past year, please consider it a repeat tribute.

My mind is on teachers. Most of them wound up their year’s work in the last week or two. Believe me, their minds and bodies might be numb. They don’t have and never did have three months off, no matter what their school system calendar might say. For the past half century I’ve had the deepest respect for the teachers with whom I’ve worked.

Teaching is draining work. Teachers are constantly giving. Not just knowledge, but energy, emotions, and every ounce of creativity they possess. The emotional part gets more intense by the year. Weakened homes have made sure of that. 

Teachers of small children particularly need our support. Children can be very demanding; however, teachers of younger children tell me that the number of demanding children is decreasing because so many children come to school sad, unresponsive, and disengaged. This too requires creativity and genuine concern and care on the part of teachers.

Here’s something taxpaying citizens need to know, especially my conservative friends. We can complain about failing schools all we want, but failing schools are often the result of failing homes. There are many children and teens as well who don’t like to leave school when the day is over all because of the help, support, and love they get from their teachers. First-year teachers learn fast why students – even high school seniors – cling to them. Often there’s little help or clinging at home.

Many days teachers leave school deeply troubled because of student needs that are not academic. A school’s chief tasks are, or should be, to provide knowledge by teaching academic content, and to build character by teaching right and wrong, especially regarding stealing, cheating, and respecting others. Nowadays students come with other needs as well.

Today schools are feeding students, clothing them, and providing therapy of all stripes. “Grief counseling” is particularly widespread, an offering which is often simply overdone and teaches students to wallow in grief instead of how to interpret and appropriate it.

Those who claim schools have moved from a knowledge-based institution to a feelings-based one are largely correct. However, schools are not an entity that is disconnected from the larger culture. Schools are a reflection of the culture we live in. What many critics don’t understand is that teachers must teach whoever enters the building, and a large percentage of those entering the building come from brokenness, fighting parents, or absentee fathers. Not all of these are from poverty- stricken homes.

If teachers must spend time training students in matters that parents didn’t attend to (discipline, social skills, lack of encouragement), how can we blame teachers or schools for having to do what should have already been done? Attending to what has not been attended to takes time from academic content.

There is a Biblical injunction that reads, “Let not many be teachers.” It refers to teachers of Scripture, but it also reminds us that schools need teachers who truly desire to teach. Our coaches are teachers too, and some of the best. Few know of the positive impact that coaches have on students, even students whom they neither teach nor coach. In the halls everybody knows “Coach.” Most male coaches are models of masculinity and cheer. Yes, masculinity still matters. Often the best influence on timid high school girls is the jocular male coaches who know how to build self-confidence; however both male and female coaches too often go unheralded. I say may their tribe increase.

Critics of education should back up and become social critics of hearth and home. And then become activists in whatever way they can: working with poor families, taking a next door teen to church or synagogue, showing an interest in all youths with whom they come in contact.

Schools are no doubt doing some things wrong. In many cases, the helping culture it has become is eroding self-reliance. Education’s therapeutic bent assumes that all students profit from words of cheer, yet many students work hard and achieve only with challenges. This bent isn’t the fault of classroom teachers. It didn’t start in the schools. A nation’s schools are downstream from its culture. And from the central office.

The “man for all seasons,” renaissance figure Thomas More, said to young Richard Rich, “Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine one, perhaps a great one.” Rich answered, “And if I were, who would know it?”

“You, your pupils, friends, God. Not a bad public, that.”

Let’s wish every teacher we know a good summer. We need them back.

 

Roger Hines

6/2/21