Recently it occurred to me how often I have felt
as if I were that innocent child in the tale of the 
vain emperor who orders new clothes from two fast-talking 
clothiers.  The clothiers claim to have the latest fashion:  
cloth of a quality so fine that it is, in fact, invisible 
to all but the most sophisticated eyes.  Only the child is 
not fooled and without concern for appearances he proclaims 
before the court that the emperor is naked.  The child does 
not intend to ridicule, belittle or hurt anyone.  He speaks 
the truth out of concern for the emperor and the welfare of 
the whole court.       
      
How many times has change been presented to an audience of school 
teachers or administrators as if it were a fine set of new clothes 
which will for a steep price quickly take care of all the ills of 
a school without any examination of values and most assuredly 
without a big effort on the part of the participants.  
The expert presenters are paid in gold for their new 
curricular clothing, laid out for all to see in a grand assembly 
after a fix-it workshop or two or three with glorious handouts and 
much ballyhoo.  Presto!  Poof!  

The problems that beset the students and staff are seemingly 
fixed and we step back to admire our emperor (or empress as the 
case may be). Looks good in those new duds, we agree.  And as in 
a thirty-minute television show all is resolved quickly and the 
clothiers are on the road to the next arena ripe for easy answers.
			
The tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a great story.  It 
has been retold in the musical The Music Man.  Here the expert with 
the "cure" is a traveling salesman who convinces the townspeople to 
order instruments and band uniforms amid much pomp and 
circumstance.  Presto!  All is changed in appearance.  
In this version of the tale some change is exacted, for indeed 
if people perceive themselves as healed, then half the battle 
is over.  

Many persons, of course, do pretend to see the emperor's 
magnificent apparel. The idea  of a deluxe town band 
is all some folks need to feel progress has been made. 
For many teachers, the long crawl to weekends and holidays 
is certainly heightened with the advent of new dress codes, 
new bell schedules, new terminology for the same old 
methods. Are these not just new monikers for the same 
old stories ? Or is it in the telling of the stories 
that the new ones get told? Or in truth is it merely 
the audience that actually changes?

Students today listen to far better music recordings on 
compact and laser disks than I did back in my childhood, listening 
to my AM radio scratching out the sounds of WAPE Radio, 
"the Big Ape," while doing chores in the yard.  Mowing the lawn, 
pulling weeds and working hard for my fifty cents of allowance.  
I didn't walk five miles through snow to get to my one-room classroom 
(after all, I grew up in Florida), but things were different. 
And the audience I teach today	is vastly different than the one 
I taught in the early 1970's or even the late 1980's for that matter. 

The students I teach today don't even blink at the 
storied emperor's nakedness.  
Yeah, he's naked all right.  
So?  
He's just a naked, fat guy.  
Maybe he'd be cool if he got an earring 
or a nipple ring or a couple of tattoos!

The ability to see through the veneer of a proposed venture 
and swiftly ascertain its strengths as well as its weaknesses 
and pitfalls is a talent which can be a stumbling block if a 
pitfall appears to be too big to surmount.  
I realize that many new projects, especially those proposing 
changes in well-established routines, have problems 
and that those problems have solutions.  Sometimes the direction of
a vision will change in the course of correcting the problems that 
arise.  However, I have often been involved with persons unwilling 
to examine certain problem areas:  a mid-school administrator who 
insists that there is no gang problem at his school; another 
administrator of a summer writing institute who insists that she 
needs no help in dealing with the grievances of live-in 
dormitory students; a third administrator gung-ho to move 
into block scheduling without considering the unique setting 
and population of the school.  Change is good; change happens.  
Indeed, change is the only constant in our world.  But change 
just for the sake of altering appearances or to conform with 
a trend is dangerous, in my opinion.  

Change need not be sweeping in order to be effective.  A small 
one that moves toward a larger one can be very worthwhile.  
Every move made can be likened to the proverbial pebble tossed 
into the still pond.  Ripples will touch every aspect of the shore 
surrounding the pond.  According to some Native American teachings, 
every action we take now affects the seven generations that 
follow.  Modifying educational systems may not be the answer as much as 
changing how we value and give value to the innocent child in 
the system, the emperor's domain.
 
I have taught many workshops for other teachers on the art 
of writing poetry, journaling and so on. A large number of 
educators I have instructed want only a set lesson plan and 
time for coffee and lunch.  I wonder who eats the more doughnuts, 
teachers or policeman.  The quick-fix philosophy is not unique 
to the teaching profession and there are many fine teachers who 
are truly interested in the idea of self-growth.  However, 
I feel there is a general lack of desire for self-knowledge in 
this country.  There is a pervasive attitude that if one is 
wearing Nike shoes and has the right label on one's shorts and 
drives the fastest car, that one is successful and fulfilled. 
We have become television shows ourselves with the 'outer limits' 
defining our personalities and where who we truly are is a 
'twilight zone' and personal feelings just an 'X files ' not to 
be opened.
 
Teaching as an institution is set up with goals in mind 
and with little flexibility in the methods for reaching those 
goals.  Facing a minimum of twenty students in each of five or 
six class periods a day teachers serve in a school that functions 
as a factory, producing shifts of students filled to the brim 
with unwieldy batches of facts and figures poured into them from 
the front of each of six classrooms on a daily basis.  Students 
are then given the opportunity, usually once a week or two, to 
spill out drops of that knowledge onto paper or computer disk 
in tests or quizzes.  There is little effort to integrate that 
knowledge with the life of a student's 24-hour day outside of 
the 6.25 hours spent in class.  Likewise, the teachers are 
isolated in their little compartments, blending little of their 
lives with those of their students or other faculty members, and 
little of their work-life is healthily "taken home" to mingle with 
the rest of their 17.75 hours a day.  Once again, this is not a
reality befalling only the teaching world.  It is one seen in 
futuristic science-fiction movies and in today's business world.  
Perhaps universally we are not in touch with the rest of the 
creatures and peoples sharing our 24-hour cruise of the daily 
turns of our planet.

In our quest for more data and information outside ourselves 
in this current world of computer webs we are drifting even 
further into the realm of factual knowledge and away from 
the domain of deeper connections, incorporating intuitive, 
holistic, and less concrete intelligence.  Emotions and 
sensations wane in a tranquilized, Prozac-filled environment 
which places high value on disconnected, material thoughts.

Some historians and educators point out that this movement 
from the holistic to the intellectual began not with the 
arrival of computers but rather with the transition from 
agrarian lifestyles to a so-called industrialized existence.  
There is a need for the head to be connected to the body.  
For the talking heads of television to connect with our hearts.  
We have become a nation of potato heads worshipping at the 
altar of television screens and computerized images.  
We have lost our balance in a world where virtual reality 
affords us the capacity to ignore our innermost feelings, 
desires, and wisdom.  Searching for success through the 
material and external is an experience in the loss of basic values.

Another way of looking at the loss of connection with 
agricultural ways is our loss of contact with maternal 
sensibilities, of a meaningful relationship with Mother 
Earth.  Without venturing into "New Age" doctrine too much 
I will simply state that this is a significant loss.  
If we are not out in the sun or touching the earth 
but rather plodding away at the computer, 
then we lose our grounding, our affiliation with the 
planet that supports us.  We are floating in a world of 
ideas and words and data, a disembodied realm which 
denies our physical being and wisdom.  But we can have both! 
There is nothing wrong with ideas and facts if they are 
balanced with our intuitive and physical knowledge and beauty.

In my class recently my students and I were exploring computer 
games available on our classroom computer.  My students were 
enjoying the simple game of 'Solitaire'.  An interesting 
fact was revealed in our conversation that day:  not one student 
in my class had ever played a game of solitaire with actual 
"hard copy" (playing) cards.  My students are proficient 
at the now "old-hat" computer game 'Tetris'.  Many are adept 
at the game 'Sim City'.  Yet not one of them has occupied 
him/herself for hours playing with wooden blocks as I did as a 
child on the floor of my grandmother's living room.  

The knowledge my students have is invaluable.  The tactile 
experience I enjoyed while manipulating actual three-dimensional 
blocks is also priceless.  There needs 
to be both.  We need balance.  

I am not suggesting that we discard our CD players 
and microwaves so that we can re-experience 
the scratchy, monophonic recordings of not so long ago or 
the patient wait for the water to boil for a cup of coffee.  
I am suggesting that we not sit in front of screens all day long.  
I am suggesting that balance in the classroom be a goal just 
as meaningful as addressing a prescribed measure of "The Three R's."  
I strongly recommend that hands-on projects, journal 
assignments, discussions, art projects and other pursuits 
that extract knowledge from deep inside the student -- 
that challenge the student to reason, to intuit and to 
apply new data to practical possibilities -- 
be made a critical part of our curriculum now and for the 21st Century.

As a teacher I place substantial merit on travel, field trips,
community involvement (in the forms of mentorships 
and volunteer activities) and getting to know oneself 
before taking on the world. The joy of learning, 
the desire to know what makes things work, 
the ability to heal ourselves and to mingle with other people 
and creatures on our planet are also important to me as a teacher.
"To gladly learn and gladly teach,"  says the lowly Oxford student 
in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  This sentiment is one of my tenets 
of teaching.  I am not the omniscient dispenser of grammar and 
syntax.  Everyday I offer opportunities to teach and my students 
offer me chances to learn about myself and my world of which 
they are a part.

Teachers rarely live in the area in which they teach.  I once 
lived in a school dormitory and taught students on the same property 
where I lived.  I was an age-old arrangement and one not likely to 
come back into fashion in most communities.  Space exploration 
helped us recognize the unity of people on our planet.  We must 
realize that our students are a part of our community no matter 
how far we as teachers commute to our schools.  We are all one in 
many respects.  We can all learn from one another.  We all have 
something to teach.  Each of us is unique and valuable.
  
Unfortunately, this fact is not generally accepted.  The career 
of teaching is not valued; nor is the role of student.  Our society
has lost its admiration for life as well as for learning 
and teaching.  Merit is tied hand and foot to what is seen 
on "Big Brother's" TV screen.  Sixties epitaphs, warnings 
and cliches are a reality today.  There is global warming 
and we are truly 'all one on the planet' with our 
individual actions indeed affecting those of our global 
neighbors.  We have arrived here now and a lot of folks 
are very unhappy.  Many people are severely depressed with the 
way things are.

There is no national enemy post-Cold War, but there are many
creepy-crawly, touchy-feely things inside us all which 
society and the American way would prefer we not examine 
and stay busy making the almighty dollar instead.  

Teachers are being asked to do a monumental task in this 
sort of society.  If society pays its police to patrol 
and its politicians to make policy and its doctors to heal 
-- well, then by God, the teachers should be out there 
teaching.  Thus we remove ourselves from the personal 
responsibility of teaching, healing, deciding and 
policing when the opportunities arise and confine 
ourselves to the isolated functions for which we get paid.  

We are all teachers, healers, politicians, and enforcers. 
We must all take responsibility for how things are here and now.  
To do this we must focus on our unique worlds within ourselves.  
How do we as individuals make peace in our communities, 
if we have not wrestled with our inner demons and declared 
inner peace, having discovered the gifts deep inside us? 

How do we change the world if we are not willing to cooperate 
or at least reconcile difficulties with our mothers and fathers, 
sisters and brothers, our children and our neighbors?  
Do we even know our next-door neighbors?  
Are they the well-mannered, "cause no problems," 
late-night murderers we will read about one day? 
Like recent movies (Falling Down  for example), 
which portray an angry person who suddenly comes unglued , 
will our whole society become unglued in a world of unabombers 
and drive-bys?

Are we as teachers willing to look at ourselves and our way of 
being in the world?  Can we truly be leaders of our children?  Are 
we willing to teach our children and to learn from them as well?  
Can we take time to listen to them and to play the role of parent 
or sister or brother to those who need and ask for such a 
surrogate relationship?  Or do we just need a complete set of 
lesson plans wrapped in a new set of clothes to help us 
on our arduous haul to weekends and cocktails 
and retirement or death?
																																						
					©2000
                                     Jeff Hartzer																																	c 1996-99, Jeff Hartzer,MEd.