…Teachers are not robots tasked with reading approved scripts. Most students who fall in love with learning do so not because of any particular curriculum but because they encounter a teacher who gives them permission to think. Great teachers force us to wrestle with questions that have plagued philosophers, politicians, religious leaders, poets and scribes for millenniums.
How do we order society in such a way that increases human flourishing and limits suffering? What is the good, the true and the beautiful? How do we make sense of the sins of the past and the way the legacies of those failures follow us to the present? What is justice? What is love and why does it hurt us so? What is the good life? Is there a God who orders the galaxies, or did we come from chaos, destined only to return to it?
The answers to those questions that I received from my teachers varied. I do not judge the worth of my former educators by whether I agreed with them. I value those who made me think and did not punish me when I diverged from them…
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