Teachers are looozers

Where does this idea come from?

Everyone’s a teacher. Or at least they should be.

I'm a teacher. Sadly, just using that description of myself prompts mixed emotions. When I retrained as a teacher I had not appreciated how strong the loathing for the profession was, that I had in fact selected a hidden box on the application form. Looozer ☑.

Why is it that teaching is perceived to go hand in hand with failure in life?

Why is it that we resent, even despise this profession?

The truth is that every adult in any civilised society has a responsibility to teach. That's an obvious necessity. How else can our culture be passed on from generation to generation?

It does seem at the moment as if there is a catastrophic failure for this basic process of continuity, tradition, and the transmission of values from one generation to the next.

The idea that education is solely the preserve of the school and the university is a tragic misunderstanding of how civilisations flourish. Teaching in the true sense that I am outlining here really has very little to do with what happens in schools and universities. As evidence of this I can list (but won’t) the many teachers I have encountered as a pupil and as a colleague who, while in the possession of a contract of employment bearing the title ‘Teacher’, have not the least resemblance to a teacher in the truer sense of the word.

I think that we are all only too aware of our responsibility to be teachers. And that this awareness is where the bizarre resentment of the profession of teaching comes from: a shamed hostility towards the very thing that we are all called to be, but choose to turn our backs on.

So, yes, there is failure associated with the profession of teaching but it is a failure that belongs to every adult in our society.

I am very heartened by the stories of people who change profession to become teachers, cleaving zeros from their pay cheque in order to follow a vocation.

However, I also think that this emphasis on changing your life entirely - in a form of self-sacrifice akin to Holy Orders - to become a teacher can be misleading. This narrative distracts us from the centrality of education to any walk of life. It can’t be an exceptional choice for the saintly: we all need to teach.

Let's pretend that I have persuaded you and you now accept that you are a teacher, or at least have a responsibility to be one. Like any other teacher. You now face a set of unanswerable but important questions.

In order to teach you have to know what to teach. And to know that, you have to have thought about your life in a deeper way than simply: big house, rich partner, fast car. The economic focus of so much of our meaning and purpose is radically exposed as shallow and phoney when you think of society in the light of education. I mean, as a teacher, is this really the totality of what you want to pass on to the next generation? It just takes just a minute, one drunken conversation in the pub, to realise that life has to be about more than that. The tackiest, most banal Hollywood movie, the most profound children's story, any verse of holy scripture, any work of philosophy, they will all point to something requiring more of us than simply a mechanistic, day to day, transactional approach to life.

So ask yourself the question, what should you teach? In the headlights of this oncoming juggernaut of a question, you soon realise that you’d better get your own life in order quickly. (As a friend tells me: ‘You can’t give what you haven’t got’.) Life is indeed short (lesson number one?) and we don't actually have time to waste it on distraction tactics, denial, the banal pursuit of temporary happiness. Especially when it's not just us that all of this is going to impact. It’s also the next generation and, of course, every generation after that. One generation lost up its own backside and so much of the wisdom we have inherited from those before us is gone.

So whether you have kids or not, step up to the responsibility that civilisation confers on us all. As a teacher, you can’t help but lead a more interesting and purposeful life.