Why Education Requires Faith, 7/29/2015

Ladies and gentlemen, Faith Evans.  Isn't she lovely...

So some time ago they took prayer out of schools.  ...Wouldn't be such a big deal if children were being taught to pray at home... *sips tea* ...but that's another day's journey.  And of course, we're not allowed to teach the Bible in our schools.  At least, not for spiritual purposes; it is, however, still considered historical source material, so it can be referenced in that capacity.  ...Kinda like any history textbook.  And it was in the midst of this discussion some years ago that I had an epiphany:  education at ANY level requires faith; faith and education can't be separated.

...Yes, I'm taking liberties here.  In this context, the words "faith" and "belief" can be used interchangeably, if you'd like.  But the bottom line is it doesn't matter what a teacher teaches or what a student regurgitates:  ultimately the educational process is complete only when the student internalizes what they've been taught--- when they believe/put faith in the teachings enough to apply them or abide by them.

The beautiful thing about disciplines such as science and math is that you have experimentation and proofs to confirm anything that's doubtful.  In grammar you're learning rules of communication, so not much "belief" is required there.  But history is the discipline where... yeah, at certain times, a little faith is required.  Don't get me wrong, historians are detectives, using evidence to piece together pictures of what happened.  But as a grade-school history student, you're often not doing the piecing; you're receiving the piecings of people in the field to be memorized and regurgitated for standardized testing purposes.  Basically, you're only demonstrating your comprehension skills, the same as you would in a literature class.

In fact, many English departments at the college level convey the idea that history is merely the greatest fiction ever composed.  ...Not a lie, per se, just not always a truth that can be definitively proven.  And this is point at which faith comes in.  To truly take history beyond simply a thing to be memorized for testing, students have to actually put faith in mankind's written record.

...Which, for any intelligent person, isn't an easy thing, considering the old adage that "History is written by the winners."  Yeah, some of the stuff in that textbook is complete B.S.  And those standards and elements... conveniently overlook some pretty important sh[tuff].

"C'mon, Son..." -W.E.B. DuBois

Still, as a teacher, I see the importance of having this faith, this belief.  Because when students have no reason to believe what they are being taught, they simultaneously have no incentive to receive the teaching.  Take it from a Black teacher whose had to teach the achievements of Black people in America to classrooms consisting of young Dukes of Hazzard in-training; there's nothing like saying "W.E.B. DuBois was a Harvard graduate" and seeing "C'mon, Son" faces all over the classroom.  

"Like, whaddaya want me to do, show you the diploma?"

"...Yeah."

>:-\

It's funny, even as I've grown into adulthood, I've often found myself questioning things that I've taken as "gospel" from my grade school education.  One of the reasons I love free-verse poetry so much, for instance, is because for years I thought that, if I dared to have incorrect punctuation or not use iambic pentameter, that I'd get struck by lightning, or by one of my former English teachers.  I had complete "faith" in the grammar system until I saw things like stream of consciousness writings of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.

And I love that Facebook meme where an entire paragraph is written with every word misspelled, yet you can read it plain as day.  That little activity shattered so many years of being meticulous about accuracy (dnot wrory, mi nto gnnoa jsut strat msspllenig stfuf; I konw spllenig hs ist plcae).

As you can probably tell by now, this isn't a "religious" or "spiritual" message.  But it's important to understand that a key component of the educational process is having enough faith and enough belief to internalize what we're taught; otherwise we never venture to apply what we've learned, which is the whole point.  "Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it," is a familiar saying, but I'd like to add another dimension to it--- "Those who know their history but have no faith in it may as well not know it."