Education Should be about Love and Encouragement

“Thanks for your response. How great is it to be able to share your Faith experience and expertise with your students? The more I teach and the more I look at the direction of education in our country, the more I am convinced that these kids need to know they are Loved. We are blessed to teach in Catholic schools where we can discuss God as the source of a transcendent form of Love that we do not need to earn and that we cannot ever lose. And as a teacher, if I can, in some small way, show my students that they are Loved, then I am actually modeling the Faith in action model we are talking about. Ultimately, our goal as Catholic school teachers, regardless of discipline or department, is to let our students know they are invited to be Loved by God to Love others in a similar way.”

I wrote this in response to a teacher who was thinking about the relationship they had with their students. She was an elementary school teacher, and, like so many other Catholic school teachers, she felt a draw to share her own Faith in the classroom. It might be easier for elementary or even middle school teachers to share their Faith in the way this teacher was doing so. Her Faith drove her, above all else, to remind her students at every chance that they were Loved and that their Love mattered. It was a classroom of encouragement more than it was a system of grading. It might be easier for primary school teachers because the students, for the most part, have not really begun to focus on a particular subject or discipline; they haven’t fallen for the illusion that education is all about their future job.

Once a week we do some individual reflection on the Gospel to explore how Scripture is telling them they are Loved by God (Photo Credit: P. Smith)

The other day I asked my high school students to respond to this question: “What is an example of an injustice?” Of course, I was expecting things like ”racism” or “sexism” or “ableism”, and those did come up, but I was somewhat surprised when I asked them to write their responses on the whiteboard and I saw “the Education System.” When I have students do a “chalk talk” I never pick the topics to discuss; I ask the students to choose which ones they want to talk about. They spoke for over an hour (block schedule) on how they feel about the Education System in the United States. I was amazed at how they related Education to what might be considered an unjust situation. In particular, they kept coming back to the idea that the way Education works in the United States seems to place greater value on students who score well on tests or get good grades. They rightly noted that there seemed to be an unspoken rule that favored students who “fit into” this system of education. What dignity does a student with artistic intelligence have in this sort of system? What about emotional intelligence? Athletic intelligence? Religious or Spiritual Intelligence? Social Intelligence? They know that ACT and SAT scores, along with GPA’s are not accurate measures of dignity, but that seems to be what schools are measuring…even Catholic schools like the one they attend.

After the individual Reflection, students gather to practice Loving and Listening with some "check-in" time. (Photo Credit: P. Smith)

Catholic schools are not designed to help students get into college or even get job. They are designed to help students (and teachers) fulfill the Universal Call to Holiness. That is, the theology and the theory help aid students and teachers to Love and to be Loved more fully every day. To become more like their Authentic Self. One student ended the conversation with the idea that school needs to be more about Love and encouragement than about grades and scholarships. The wisdom of these teenagers floors me. Indeed, the dignity of the human person is best seen in the Love they have, not in the grades they get. And education should be about discovering and revealing that dignity.