When I first drafted this post I considered a rather provocative title for this particular entry. I changed part of it. I could have written: Guilty as Hell, but that's far more Calvinistic than I can stomach. But it leads me to what troubles me about my career. The public school classroom reveals itself for what it is: a laboratory for investigating and unmasking in myriad ways the reality of Original Sin. One thinks of The Lord of the Flies, and one becomes solemn. I'm not sure, but I can imagine that most parents hope that their child's teacher will be such a person that doesn't believe in a concept of Original Sin, or at least can shelve such a concept for their children's sake. So much nowadays seems to revolve around bolstering a person's (a student's) self-esteem, that almost everything, including the truth about what a child does, and how a child is motivated, must take a back seat to making sure a child's feelings aren't hurt.
It seems that every time I turn around I'm told to build up a child's self-esteem, as if such an action in itself has innate and irrefutable benefits for each and every child. Self-esteem has become a Virtue on a par with Love, Mercy, and Truthfulness. But self-esteem isn't a virtue; it simply denotes one's self-concept, and a judgment about whether one measures up--or not. I believe a healthy or truthful self-esteem is chiefly and overwhelmingly influenced by the amount of hard, sincere, creative work or labor a child (or any person, for that matter) puts into a project or objective. Little does self-esteem depend on the fanciful praises of an educator or parent. It depends on what one accomplishes, and the motivation behind one's actions. And quite frankly, one's motivations are highly suspect: my own included. I have come to know a few children, as well as many adults, who do not suffer from a low self-esteem, but most definitely suffer from a lack of compassion, honesty and a sense of justice. Self-esteem, in itself, is amoral. As far as I can surmise, Adolf Hitler had an exaggerated self-esteem. He esteemed himself so highly, that the annihilation of entire ethnic races seemed necessary.
But let me get back to the topic at hand: innocence.
You see, kids aren't so innocent because humans aren't so innocent. We are fallen, which means that something in us is fundamentally broken, at our very core. It isn't the case that children are born virtuous and innocent then gradually become jaded, corrupted and selfish by watching and mimicking adults. No, they, like we, were born only desiring to look out for themselves, ole' number one. One of the chief purposes of education is to open their eyes and hearts to the needs of the world, and tear their eyes away from gazing incessantly into the mirror of their own wants and egos. At least that is what I believe.
I've been experiencing a lot of that internal human brokenness this year in my classroom. This isn't a simple, disparaging comment, a withered sigh of still another beleagured and overtaxed public school teacher, pining after the golden days when school budgets weren't leaner than a trimmed flank steak, or when class sizes hovered around twenty instead of thirty. No, this is a sober theological reflection: We are broken. Kids are broken. And it will take more than an exciting, challenging, whole-language, hands-on curriculum to get them fixed. It will take God.
In his book, Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about the awakening of a sense of discomfort with the world and himself when he was a teenager. He writes: " Still, I knew, because of my own feelings, there was something wrong with me, and I knew it wasn't only me... It showed itself in loneliness, lust, anger, jealousy, and depression. It had people screwed up bad everywhere you went--at the store, at home, at church, [at school, I might add]; it was ugly and deep. Lots of singers on the radio were singing about it, and cops had jobs because of it. It was as if we were broken... It was as if we were cracked, couldn't love right, couldn't feel good things for very long without screwing it all up..."
Later Don Miller makes some very thoughtful and sobering comments about our political system and why the Constitution was written in the way it was. His thoughts about the greatness of our Constitution doesn't exactly elevate one's view of humanity, but it's realistic. And true. "It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn't make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse."
Kids aren't the only ones broken. So are adults. All adults. All of us. Some of us realize this and are letting God, by degrees, repair us, fix us, un-break us, mend us. He is making all things new. But this remaking and renewing of ourselves is not happening because a teacher has reasoned with a kid who gets his jollies from poking his neighbor, calling the kid with glasses "four eyes," or stealing someone's lunch just because he wants to see her cry. Cruelty, rebellion, theft, perversion, hatred, wrath and murder begin in small ways. Imperceptible acts of selfishness and egocentricity. The best we can do is dispel the myth that people will be doing these crimes because they "didn't know any better." Our work is to make sure our kids, as they become our adults, do know better, even if they persist in not doing any better. God's Spirit intercedes at that point, or else... or else all collapses in despair. Contemporary Innocence is a myth. Like Paradise, it was lost long ago.
