By Frank Breslin

Some students come from homes that are conducive to learning, and they do well in school; others don’t come from such homes and, with few exceptions, do poorly.

Why? It is hard to teach children from homes where marital strife or impending divorce convulses their sense of themselves; where they are physically or emotionally abused; where little parental concern is shown for them, and even less about how they fared while at school; where they can’t talk out their problems with a caring mother or father; where self-discipline and a solid work ethic have never been taught or parentally modeled; and where discussion of values is restricted to shopping.

It is hard to teach children who come from homes that are an emotional wasteland; where learning and the things of the mind aren’t respected or cherished; where parents don’t talk to their children, don’t show interest in their victories or share their defeats; where they don’t open up the world to them by addressing their questions or are too busy to do the old-fashioned things that parents always did in the past — like being parents!

It is hard to teach a fatherless or a motherless child who feels cheated by a parent’s absence or loss; a lonely child uprooted by a parent’s job relocations, who no longer tries to make friends at school; a spoiled child bribed by parental guilt-offerings for time and affection rarely bestowed; a defeated child who has abandoned all hope; an alienated child who feeds on rejection and loneliness; or an angry child who lashes out to prove he exists and will make the world pay for his pain.

These are but a few of the many sad stories familiar to teachers who are only too aware that some of these children may never be reached, but who, nonetheless, never give up on them, so that maybe, through learning, they can find a new world.

This is a dimension of teaching rarely discussed outside the profession, an aspect of teaching that depresses the spirit, as do life’s tragedies with all first responders. However, when such tragedies befall innocent children, they are all the more tragic.

How can teachers be held accountable for such barriers to learning in these blighted young lives?

Teachers don’t teach subjects. They teach children subjects, and therein lies the art of teaching.

Anyone can master a body of knowledge, but imparting knowledge to children in ways that enable them to grow and to see the world differently, that inspire them to reimagine who they are and what they still may become, that show them how to use what they have learned to discover their dreams and pursue them — this is the lifeblood of teaching, especially when teachers may very well be a child’s only lifeline.

Teaching is about taking children from where one finds them, no matter what their home situation, trying to move them forward and, hopefully, returning them whole to themselves.

Teaching is dealing with the collateral damage of young lives adrift and bringing them back from the edge.

Teaching is not about preparing for mandated state testing on tests that are racially and culturally biased and that set children up for victimization and additional failure — tests rigged as pretexts for shutting down schools and turning them over to charters, which, like circling vultures overhead, descend on these children to cash in on their misery.

For it is precisely this that is happening all over America and in the state of New Jersey today, where teachers are forced to abandon the real needs of such children for the institutionalized madness of standardized testing.

And why do New Jersey officials believe they are above accountability for imposing such testing, when its value is questioned by so much research? Why don’t they respond to their critics? Is their silence an admission that their case is so weak?

A cabal of interests with its own dark agenda is destroying public education, which Trenton officials have sworn a sacred oath to uphold, and which these same officials then sell off piecemeal for 30 pieces of silver as a quid pro quo for political favors.

But yet another alarming development is having a corrosive effect on the American classroom: a widespread perception among teachers today that more parents than one would care to imagine have simply abdicated their responsibility for raising their children, handed it over to the school and just walked away. In the past, one could assume that the children who entered the school had been properly raised, but, alas, this is no longer the case.

Today, too many schools have been turned into emergency wards struggling to instill basic standards of civilized conduct, which should already have been taught in the home.

Schools cannot take the place of the home, nor teachers a child’s parents. 
If parents do their jobs, so that teachers can teach and not be surrogate parents, children are always the winners.

Frank Breslin is a high school teacher with 40 years of experience. He has taught Latin and social studies and currently teaches English and German.