The End of Wisdom

“After 32 years … I couldn’t take it any more. I vowed to fight CC … It was killing me to do the ridiculous and stupid things that the supervisor and principal thought were necessary. They were able to brainwash the young teachers… [and] if teachers talked negatively about CC, they could be easily replaced. I have some curse words for them, but I have to restrain myself.”
~Anne Blythe Brooks~

Don’t hold back at all!

That’s what put us in this mess in the first place. Too few spoke up. Too few resisted.

Too few stood their ground. And now … too many are loaded with regret.
Lots are like you. Resolute and determined. But your retirement has just been recast … redesigned … and reimagined.

Welcome to the crusade.

But …Where does the next generation of teachers get their wisdom? Who makes the greenhorns less green and the naive less naive? Who oracles them?

Know who? The folks at the back door.

Folks like you … and me. And lots of others. Those are the master-teachers … and they’re leaving in droves.

They’re running away from these reform idiots … fleeing from theoretical know-it-alls and the know-nothing politicians. Escaping asinine, Ivy League savants who issue edicts about reading, writing, and thinking … while assuring us that their absence of any real classroom experience makes them all the more the genius.

But this sudden exodus isn’t the usual changing of the guard.

When this brigade of Gray Heads gather up their experiences and box their lives … and leave for good … they’ll be packing up decades of wisdom that will no longer be at the ready for the newbies who are never, ever as ready as they think.

The most important things learned about teaching happen in whispers, asides, or in nonchalant conversations. And it’s almost always in the presence of some Gray Head who did what we would all come to do later in our own careers … pass along big and small wisdoms.

And now those splendid souls are leaving. Vanishing.

Repulsed by this reform-idiocy that has spun out of control.

And in their moving vans are moving stories young teachers absolutely need to know. Informal survival guides. Reference materials for soothing young souls and restitching torn hearts.

What’s in those boxes are manuals for curing failure and repairing kids who’ve had a bottom-bounce. Those are medicine boxes with un-named elixirs for hurts and wounds of all sorts.

And all of this magic is flying out the back doors of schools everywhere.

Those master-teachers are the antidote for this lunatic reform. And soon, they will have disappeared. Faded away. Their wisdom unremembered.

One day … not certain when … we will recover our balance and acknowledge this dreadful mess.

But we won’t have those old souls around to retro-fit our broken schools. It won’t be easy. At all.

Education is in for a great wander.

And so, Anne Blythe Brooks, welcome to the retirement you never saw coming.

Welcome to the crusade.

Denis Ian