This makes me think about all the years I spent teaching at university, high school and for a few years at an all-girls catholic day school. The biggest difference in teaching at all these places was the attitudes of the administration. While the two upper level schools embodied the desire to teach students to think critically for themselves and to question what materials they were presented, the middle school administration fought almost every change I instituted in my classroom and in my position as a working artist. When I questioned the reasons for each limitation of change the answer I most often received was, “that’s not how we have done it in the past”. This seemed, and still seems to me to be a fundamentally flawed rhetoric in the face of education. We educate our young people so that they learn to think critically, to evaluate and to come to sound decisions on their own. when we follow what has always been, remain static and don’t want to hear or question what is going on around us, we fail to learn, fail to grow and fail to create a humanitarian and thoughtful society that respects all its members equally.
