In this modern world of apostate voices in all the compartments of life, including education, there yet remains the noble hungering to be a good teacher. Only the Holy Scriptures reveal the possibility of such a person on earth.
Of course, the very problem of the age is a part of the plague that decimates the wholeness and balance among us.
Either we enslave ourselves into the mediocrity of a bland, blasé, subnormal; or we tolerate our proud lot as a specialist in our major only to override the major of another into a minor place.
Either the mind flows with a meticulous boast of grammatical syntax, while the voice reiterates the reverse; or our speech succeeds without the companion of grammar at all.
Either the exactitude of our mathematics boasts our superiority, or speculative philosophy precludes truth entirely.
Either the physical sciences bolster the ego of our law, order, and design; or the social sciences obliterate the hope of any ideal at all.
Of course, the teacher that God seeks never forgets that he commenced from ignorance in the Kindergarten to the academic maturity and Biblical character to become a Kinderguardian soldier. A Kinderguardian? Yes. We who were the children move from that most kind garden to the gate house to guard the lives of others.
This place, reserved by God for a few, will become a reality for only mature leaders when their full learning process takes hold of a classical, plenary Christian education.
The Kindergarten teacher begins the Kinderguardian climb with grammar, speech, and spelling in the very presence of the class a first an exampler rather than an instructor. For who could teach an alphabetic-phonetic unless first the articulation were there? We fool only ourselves if we think we teach at all unless we example our subject before their very eyes.
Then, the First Grade appears. And that First Grade pleads, in addition to the necessary curriculum guides, for the longest climb of all—from the simple to the profound, from the meager etiquette of eating with the mouth closed to the full practice of discipline in the chair. We must teach them this, too, from the very First Grade. It must start there.
And then on to the other grades—the Second through the Twelfth—and on to college, too.
The grades will follow on too fast for us—for us, if we are subnormal ones. Yes, the subnormal teacher only fulfills the study guides, which are the very least to complete, though we must complete them.
But we must move on—pursue the greater knowledge of the child himself.
That noble gown that stands before the class must bring every private room of thought in that dear child into the singular auditorium of full learning and classical flow.
It is often because the teacher himself, when but a child, saw and studies only the lesson of the island-compartments floating around a partial mind that he now only sees the very same lesson plan before the student and therefore negates the larger epistemological increase.
When will that teacher catch up on the homework of his own deficiencies of his earlier education?
What of the shoddy habits and ruined compartment he has abandoned to the past?
Do you and I, dear teacher, detect early the tendency towards gossip in the student before us? It commences in them at an alarming early age.
Do we deal with this along with the curriculum guide with an earnest spirit? We must, you know.
What about that other pupil over there whose mood did set the tone for the day against the learning process? Then we neglected to correct it, but after that neglect did overreact with panic amidst the loss of our own composure. At times, did we even lose control of the class? Did it master us that day? Where is our altar before Christ, then?
We must not comfort self because self knows the academic subject. We must remember: "the end of the learning is to know God."
Do we wait too long before we get the order of the class, only at last to surrender it again to our own anger and proceed to go further than we should have in a discipline which would have never been needed if we had seen the earlier pride of the child for an attention that child never deserved?
By the way, is there any connection or relationship between the anger of the classroom with a similar root of anger in our own marriages back home?
But we must hasten to another step on the ladder of our tutorial ministry. Do you, dear teacher, waste the semester days in pursuing your own pet subjects or unprepared lessons only at the end, before the academic dean appears, have to speed up in such a hurry that your student races on to oblivion and you wonder why he failed that last test?
Do you, in your own mind and in your own mind alone, really think your class is history, English, music, philosophy, speech or even Bible to be superior to the whole Christian education of the child himself?
O dear one, you and I are always and only a part of his or her ongoing education.
Do we wallow in the pride of our own blinded thought to contrive a position of learning that thinks it supersedes any other part of the Academus? No one part is as valuable as the whole—to the soul!
Do you stress to yourself your preparation and achievement in the subject as someone unusual, while your simple attendance to the class is tardy?
Did you notify the academic dean early, as early as you could, when you were to be absent? Even when you were sick?
Do we constantly run overtime in the class periods and the subjects to which we are assigned? They were assigned; we do not choose the day-by-day direction.
Will we ever regulate our class to the clock?
Do we carefully plan the content of the class, only to mar, scar, and bar the time-limit to complete it?
When we are corrected, do we feel the corrector has not the spirit of the Lord Jesus?
Do we demean the Lord by defending merely the argument of the subject before the class, while we descend to the lower precincts of disrespect before them all by being determined to win the argument?
Possibly, yet, these questions have not gained your heart and mine. Should we persist once again and enter through another door of thought?
What of our appearance, our diction, our habits in general before the class?
Do these contradict all that we have ideally presented in the content of the fleeting years?
Do we know that a teacher without character is truly a teacher unprepared?
God desires for us to teach, authoritatively, one, two or three subjects in a lifetime; yet they stand incomplete except as they contribute to the intercontinental place of total learning. It is possible to end up very knowledgeable in a tower of pride without a single weapon in the armory for the battle.
Even if we do resolve, by the grace of God, all that this treatise purports, you and I will still be only at the smallest speck of our potential in Christ and His power.
Unless we see the larger vision of it all—that of our deep ignorance of the very subject we claim as our proficiency—we will never mount up with eagle's wings to regions above—above our self-imposed boundaries.
If we still remain in our present state, pulling our own security blanket around us, manufactured by our own pride, we shall probably be remembered in the longer photograph of life with our thumb in our mouth perpetuating our infancy.
If this burden laid deliberately upon us seems to undo us, then we have never soared where teachers thrill and thrive to voices beyond their time.
There is a Teacher far above us all Who stood for only three and one-half years upon this planet Earth.
With His life, words, deportment, carriage, culture, Literature (capital "L"), beauty, cleanliness, comeliness head, hand, foot, and all else of His Person, He taught the complete Christian epistemology so much needed in a fallen world.
And His classrooms continue immortal and eternal!
There survives no secular or human education for Him! Unless Jesus is sufficient to change us from our past and puny receipts of roll books to a greater delivery of Christ, Character, and Culture for all our students, we will never become what we ought to become simply because this author wrote a midge of a matter through this meager script.
Hark! Who is that by yonder door, beckoning us on to that which we never dreamed?
O Dear Heavenly Father, it is Jesus with a child—both standing there awaiting our entrance into the classroom, to the desk, the Text, the test, and the chalkboard.
Dear God, I fall across the threshold. Will I ever rise again? Wilt thou raise me up from this floor so that I might see Infinity come down into the finite thimble of my teacher's hope?
If Thou wilt, then I will go into that classroom again.
Amen.