We Must Regard all Students as Members of the Human Family

Charged with the responsibility to provide an excellent education to all of our precious children, we have the responsibility to regard all students as part of the human family.

Too often, commentators of both the political left and the political right variously apologize for the inadequacies of K-12 public education or moan pessimistically about prospects for gaining better results, based on the putative failings of families mired in poverty. Many of those so apologizing or so moaning write as if they themselves are nestled in cozy domestic retreats or are engaged in the conceit of philosophical speculation from the safety of think-tanks.

From the perspective of one who is on the streets and in the homes of those about whom the lefties and the righties despair, the apologizing and the moaning have the aura of the surreal, reality skewed by the romantic ruminations of those more interested in sounding smart and professing concern than working toward solutions. And the solutions are available if we were to embrace, depending on the religious or humanist orientations of the commentators, either our religious or our civic responsibility, to consider ourselves part of the human family and thus to regard all children as our own.

This is my approach, pursued seven days a week, in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Increasingly, new students who enter my program are very young, typically younger members of families who already have at least one child (and often two, three, or more) in the Initiative. New participants understand, without even having to wonder, that they are now more active members of a family to which they already belong, a family that is an extension of their natal domiciles, the extended family that is New Salem. They know that the relationships that they form with me are eternal. They know this because they have witnessed other family members pack into my car every week and ride off for two hours of training for eventual performance at the highest levels in math, reading, and a broad and rich liberal arts curriculum.

These newer students tend to be in kindergarten when they first enroll. This means that they will study with me, converse with me, go to Shakespearean festivals with me, dine on dinners of my preparation, and demonstrate their stratospheric feats of academic skill and talent at the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative across the weeks, months, and years to come. These students will hear stern words from me about the consequences of faulty academic effort at school, homework not turned in, projects that are neglected.

They will rarely face those consequences, because they do not want to disappoint me, to hear a reiteration of those words; and over time they internalize the ethic of educational excellence so thoroughly that they want to succeed for themselves, their lives, their futures. My students feel my love, as all children do when nurtured by a caring adult. They feel in it in the way that I speak to them, ask about their lives, listen to their complaints, offer counsel when they are laden with the burdens of growing up in tough urban environments. They feel the love in my hugs. They know I mean it when I say something like “You know I love you, right?” because they are likely to reply, “Yeah, and I love you, too, Mr. [or, more typically, without the title of “Mister”] Gary.”

When a teacher deserving of the appellation embraces the sacred responsibility of educating all children who grace her or his life, that teacher regards each as that caring adult’s own. A teacher whose students are mostly those from challenged economic and familial circumstances does not ring her or his hands while uttering apologies for not being able to do the job or emitting moans that nothing can be done until all families are more nearly an approximation of perfection. She or he instead communicates that an enduring relationship has been formed, that the caring is as deep as if forged by bonds of consanguinity, that the standards are high, that the academic goals will be met, and all necessary help will be rendered in the ascent toward success.

To the degree that student failure in K-12 education occurs because of familial circumstances, those shortcomings are those of the human family of which we are all a part and for which we all bear religious or humanistic responsibility.