Teach Your Children Well
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
June 15, 2008
When I was about eleven, I was responsible for cleaning out the bulk milk tank on our dairy farm near Madison, Wisconsin. The big milk tanker would come sometime in the early morning and drain the tank, and then I followed with a hose, soap, and a long-handled brush. I suppose I hadn’t been trained too well to the job – something like “Clean the milk tank” – and I was perhaps slightly less enthusiastic than I might have been, but I did the job every other day as instructed. One day the milk inspector showed up to examine our milking operation. He looked over the milking machines, the barn and milk house, and of course the milk tank. He found that the milk tank was less than spotless in some of the more obscure areas and told my father he’d need to tighten up on that task. My father called me over and said, “Well, my son Paul is the one who takes care of that. You could show him what he needs to do.” The inspector proceeded to gently and respectfully lead me through the process of cleaning out the tank, drawing attention to areas where I’d been hasty in my cleaning and showing me exactly what I needed to do. Thereafter I took particular pride in getting the job done the right way, as I’d been instructed.
As this interaction was unfolding, there were moments of intense shame on my part; I felt my father was turning me in for some wrongdoing, and I resented the fact that he didn’t shield me from the inspector and take the responsibility for the defect himself. I felt as though he were turning me in, somehow. As I thought about it more, though, I realized that he hadn’t put on me more than I could bear; that he had insisted I take responsibility for the work I had been assigned; and that he had so arranged things that I would both learn more exactly what I needed to do and take my responsibility more seriously. My father is a man of few words, but there at least was a well-taught lesson.
When I was about fifteen, I had been on the high school debate team for a year and was beginning to feel pangs of conscience over having to argue both sides of some controversial issue – I think we were debating capital punishment that year – and in a fit of conscience I dropped off the team to maintain the purity of my convictions. Now that my Saturdays were free, my father assigned me to muck out the young calves’ pen in the barn on Saturday mornings, when I would normally have been debating. I went about the work with a will, but after about three weeks I began to reconsider the tradeoffs of my decision to leave the debate team. In some fairly stark way, it seemed that I would either be engaged in manual labor or in intellectual labor on Saturdays, and it occurred to me that learning as much as I could about the debate topic both pro and con might be a better use of my talents than mucking out the calf stall week after week.
My father is a man of few words, and I’ve never asked if he intended me to rejoin the debate team or just needed to get the calf pens mucked out; whatever he intended, the result for me was positive, because it encouraged me on the road to learning as well as doing.
Each of you could probably cite many stories of fathers, mothers, grandparents, teachers, friends and enemies who taught you in your youth and helped to shape who you have become. Today, of course if Fathers’ Day, so we pay particular attention to that relationship. Today we have also in particular honored the teachers of our Children’s Religious Education classes here at Second Parish, and that teaching is a critical part of what it is we do here as a religious community. We are all teachers of our children here both in our direct interactions with the children and by the examples we set here and elsewhere in their lives. But we all also have many other opportunities for teaching our children well in our families and in our community.
Our reading this morning by William Ellery Channing says, “There is no office higher than that of a teacher of youth, for there is nothing on earth so precious as the mind, soul, character of the child.” Indeed, Channing went on to say, “We think it a greater work to educate a child, in the true and large sense of that phrase, than to rule a state.” While a great deal of time and passion has been spent in public debate on education in this country, I think one thing that’s clear is that we don’t regard the task of teaching our children as more important than the task of ruling the state. We have been fortunate in this town and in others nearby that the customary support for our public schools has remained strong. However, that is hardly true across the country or even across this Commonwealth. Divisive political conflicts and attacks on our public schools on religious grounds as well as by those who would minimize spending on all of the public goods we share have reduced the solid bedrock of support long provided our public school system in ways that will not serve our nation well in the long run.
Channing was speaking in particular of education in our schools, but I want also to speak of the teaching we do in our extended families and in our congregation as well. Our task as parents, grandparents, family members and friends of children is to help anchor our children in our own experience of the past, to give them roots to hold them close so that they can develop their wings in safety. We live in a society which is constantly stimulated to buy, invest in, and consume that which is new. More human knowledge was accumulated in the last century than in all of human history before, and it can seem as though whatever elders have learned in their lifetimes is obsolete. On the contrary, I believe that wisdom is timeless. The worlds of science and of commerce transform rapidly, but the nature of human beings changes very slowly. The virtues which guided the founding of this nation and of our religious traditions are very much virtues which still apply in our day, no matter how much faster the pace of our lives may be. The attitudes, interpersonal skills and life orientations which we have learned in our lives are very much relevant to our children. Our task as teachers – all of us, whatever our relation to our children – is to make that wisdom available in ways that speak to our children, ways that inform their hearts and minds and consciences.
One temptation parents and grandparents face is the desire to ensure that our children do not suffer from want in any form, the desire to ensure that they have what we might have lacked. The risk is that, in striving to ensure that they lack for nothing, we may deprive them of some of what we had that we didn’t appreciate. Having grown up in a poor farm family, I was motivated to work hard and make a good living for my family. On the other hand, I had ready access to my father – after all, he worked at home! – while I myself was gone for long hours each day as I commuted to New York City from our suburban home. Material want is hardly the worst kind of deprivation to suffer; I remember fondly the title of a memoir by a farm wife from the Great Depression: We Didn’t Have Much But We Sure Had Plenty. An exclusive focus on material well-being is one of the risks against which we need to inoculate our children if they are to have fulfilling lives. In a world whose limits are becoming rapidly more apparent, it is increasingly important that we teach our children to live wisely and well rather than profligately. In many cases, this means simply reviving some of the virtues of thriftiness grandparents learned as children. In this way, elders can serve a particularly important function in our families.
Above all, we teach by our own example. Our lives are the best model we have to offer our children. We all know the old commonplace that children do what they see, not what they hear. If we hope, for example, that our children will obey the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and mother,” we need to model honoring our own parents, as we honor our fathers on this particular day.
We know that our children come to us with very individual characters. We may be astonished to find such differences between children within our own families despite similarities of genetic makeup and environment. Each child embodies the mystery of a destiny which she or he alone can unfold. Our task is to provide them the means to discipline what they have been given so that they can put on their wings when the time comes and begin to fly free of our constant direction and guidance. We must teach each child according to his or her character so that all of their capabilities unfold as they are ready and so that their particular uniqueness can become apparent.
Channing speaks of how teachers may do this, but it applies also to parents and to grandparents:
The highest ability [in teaching] is that which penetrates farthest into human nature, comprehends the mind in all its capacities, traces out the laws of thought and moral action, understands the perfection of human nature and how it may be approached, understands the springs, motives, applications, by which the child is to be roused to the most vigorous and harmonious action of all its faculties, understands its perils, and knows how to blend and modify the influences which outward circumstances exert on the youthful mind.[1]
This passage points up one of the key differences between liberal and conservative theories of education. As religious liberals, we start from the premise that the child has within the capability for goodness and we set out to nurture and direct that goodness. We do not believe that children are inherently wicked or that their spirits must be broken for them to achieve maturity; instead we believe they must be taught the skills of self-discipline. We do not believe in indoctrination but rather in acculturation into our traditions and the practice of inquiry to determine what is true and right and good. We believe that it is good for them to be exposed to the reality of the world around them rather than being sheltered from anything which might challenge our beliefs and our life choices. At the same time, we know that we must provide them tools for understanding how the world works and what their role within it ought to be. We know that our task is to open out the world to our children, not to protect them from it at all costs. We also know that we cannot dictate how they will take flight; we must have faith that we have done our teaching well and that they will find their own destiny.
These ideas undergird our vision for religious education here at Second Parish. We believe it is important to teach our religious heritage as a religious community, so stories from the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Jesus have a key role here. We also believe it is important that our children become acquainted with other faith traditions both by studying in classrooms and by visiting other worship services. We do this, not so that our children can decide for themselves when they grow up what religious tradition to follow but rather so that they understand that we live in a pluralistic world where there are many approaches to the sacred and that some wisdom can be gleaned from each. We provide tools for exploring our religious identity and that of other traditions. One of our goals is to awaken the natural curiosity of each child about the life of the spirit as well as of the earth and all that has sprung from it. We teach self-discipline in our classrooms by developing covenants – agreements about how we will be together as we learn so that the needs of all are considered. We teach them that worship is serious and also enjoyable, that we gather here to rejoice but also to hold each other up in times of hardship. Above all, we teach them that they are beloved in this their religious community.
Let me close with this by Kahlil Gibran, “On Teaching:”
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.
And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.
For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.
And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one
of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.[2]
Amen.