An Entirely Wrong-Headed Proposal for USCCB Funding of Lay Theological Education at America Magazine: My Critical Response

As I've mentioned here in the past, I have given up on reading the Jesuit weekly America, even though I read it faithfully for many years, from my undergraduate days at a Jesuit university where I was taught by an esteemed Jesuit who played a key role in the magazine from its early days, until . . . well, until I gave up on America. Having comments I made on its discussion board, in which I considered myself to be defending gay folks against slander, and thought I was using rational and inoffensive statements to pursue that end, soured me on America. Having these comments deleted without any explanation offered to me soured me on America and its "open" discussions of Catholic issues.

Book Notes: Joelle Casteix's The Well-Armored Child: A Parent's Guide to Preventing Sexual Abuse

I have a book to recommend to you — particularly those of you raising children, or with friends and relatives raising children. The book will also be useful and very instructive for those committed to addressing the problem of sexual abuse of young people, as I believe many readers of this blog are. It's Joelle Casteix's The Well-Armored Child: A Parent's Guide to Preventing Sexual Abuse (Austin: River Grove, 2015).

Aristotle on Education as Education of Both Mind And Heart

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” ― Aristotle "Aristotle" by Francesco Hayez. pic.twitter.com/MFP460aVwO
— ✍ Bibliophilia (@Libroantiguo) March 29, 2015

Week's-End News Round-Up: Catholic Bishops and Shutdown, Exporting of Anti-Gay Hate by U.S. Religious Right, Malala Yousafzai

As the work week ends, valuable news commentary I've noticed in recent days, which adds new information to discussions we've had here in the past:

United Nations Declares July 12 "Malala Day": A Reflection on Saints for Our Times

A few days ago, a reader, bosicO, suggested here that reform-minded groups within the Catholic church should put forth their own candidates for sainthood--and that these need not be Catholic. Bosic's thinking about this matter dovetails with my own. I've long had my own eccentric, idiosyncratic canon of saints who have made a profound difference in my own life, but will never--barring miracles I don't see coming down the pike--be officially canonized.

Santorum and the South: Think Education

Why did Santorum clean up in the South yesterday when so many media pundits--who never set foot in the South until an election cycle comes around--assured us that Romney had taken the lead over Santorum in Alabama and Mississippi?  As Randall J. Stephens and Karl Gibberson, authors of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, explain, it's all about that old-time religion.

Paul Krugman on GOP Investment in Ignorance: Whys and Wherefores

Paul Krugman explains (very well) why one major American political party, the Republicans, have "made a hard right turn against education," and are seeking to undermine a longstanding American ideal of seeing education provided for all citizens: it's, quite simply, in the best interests of the GOP to keep people under-educated.  And ignorant.  

Scott Herring on the Role of Literature in Recreating the Past

I think that Scott Herring's point about the role literature plays in bringing the past to life is well-taken: it's one of the points I wanted to make yesterday, when I wrote about Kathryn Stockett's book The Help.  Because we Americans have a short historical memory, we lose the significant check and balance that history can provide us if we pay close attention to it.  We lose its significant checks and balances as a culture, to the extent that our culture lacks knowledge or understanding of history.

Marquette Situation, More Commentary: "Not Catholic Enough" When It Practices Discrimination

  

What I posted yesterday about Ronni Sanlo's report re: the situation for LGBT faculty, staff, and students at Jesuit-owned Marquette University in Milwaukee focused on the disparity between what Jesuit institutions proclaim about themselves--"We do justice!"--and how Marquette  actually deals with LGBT members of the campus community, if Sanlo's report is correct.  For the epigraph to my posting, I took something from Ranlo's report that she heard from the Marquette community about this disparity:

Making Things Tic: A Codger's Ruminations on Literacy Today (and What the Lack Thereof Portends for Our Future)

Is Conor Friedersdorf intending to be cute with this coy use of the word "tic"--"What makes you tic, sir?"--or does he really not know how to spell the word "tick" (and that we commonly ask what makes things tick, not tic)?  If the latter, then I'm baffled.  I'm increasingly baffled by the shaky literacy of graduates of  even elite universities these days.  I've just read a novel by an English writer who's a graduate of New College, Oxford, and a former Conservative MP, who appears not to know that the case of the pronoun "whoever" is governed by its use in the clause in which it appears, and not by the preposition or verb setting the clause into motion.

Religious Roots of Anti-Gay Attitudes: Two Recent Commentaries

Two noteworthy pieces in the past several days dealing with the significant connection between religion and people’s approach to issues of sexual orientation.  At Religion Dispatches, Constance Chellew-Hodge dissects the divine “chain of command” argument that structures many conservative Christians’ approach to homosexuality.

Memories of a Jesuit Education: Rose Gardens and Open-Toed Sandals

A story half dream, all remembrance, evoked by the memories of high-school Latin class I shared earlier in the week:

I go off to college, Latin medal in hand.  Because the scholarship I’ve earned seems to be premised on majoring in theology (I had to write something on the form, when it asked about my plans for a major), I seem locked into a theology major.

Aging and Learning: The Gift of Fallibility

I’ve noted recently on this blog that I’m growing older.  Just a little bit, maybe?  I’ve talked about turning 60 just a little bit perhaps.

I don’t mean to be obsessed with an experience that, after all, affects every one of us every time the clock ticks.  Still, I’m fascinated by some of the aspects of growing older about which I haven’t thought much in the past.  Because I wasn’t then where I am now, on the chronological scale of things . . . .

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on GLSEN Day of Silence

On 25 March, I reported on this blog (here) that the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met on 23 March with representatives of Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), an organization devoted to challenging homophobia in American schools. GLSEN sponsors the annual Day of Silence to combat school bullying based on sexual orientation. This year’s Day of Silence was held on 17 April.

I’m now pleased to read a report by Jenna Lowenstein at 365Gay (here) noting that Arne Duncan mentioned the Day of Silence on his Education Department blog (here) on 17 April. Mr. Duncan’s blog states,

Yesterday, many Americans paused to remember the senseless death of 32 students at Virginia Tech in 2007. Today, many Americans will honor the Day of Silence called for on behalf of victims of harassment and bullying around issues of sexual orientation, including a recent suicide who would have turned 12 today.

As Jenna Lowenstein reports, Secretary Duncan’s decision to make note of the Day of Silence on his blog is significant, since he is the first Secretary of Education to acknowledge this annual event.

As I’ve noted in a number of previous postings, I have a strong interest in this topic as an educator who has worked in church-sponsored universities with an historic commitment to preparing future teachers. I’ve also noted (here) that I was punished at a United Methodist-owned university for even mentioning GLSEN in a list of many organizations that faculty and students interested in civic engagement might consider studying.

As the Bilgrimage posting to which I’ve just linked, along with many other postings on this blog, notes, universities can and should play a key role in combating school bullying and prejudice based on sexual orientation in American classrooms. They can do so by preparing teachers who understand the mechanisms of discrimination, who are committed to opposing prejudice, and who are proactive about preventing bullying based on sexual orientation.

Church-related institutions should be leading the way here. Sadly, they are often not doing so. Instead, as Martin Luther King noted re: churches in the American South during the Civil Rights struggle, they are functioning as the taillight of necessary social change, rather than the prophetic headlight.

It’s time for our church-related universities to stop promoting homophobic prejudice. The new Secretary of Education is pointing the way, and universities that produce teachers for the American classroom—including church-owned ones—would do well to follow his lead.

Stimulus Package as Opportunity to Reshape American Education

Nicholas Kristof has some important things to say today about American education in his New York Times op-ed piece about poor educational system as our national shame
(here).

Kristof notes that the stimulus package allocates more than $100 billion for education, whereas the entire discretionary budget for the Education Department last year was $59 billion. As he notes, this provides an opportunity for us to look very carefully at what works within our educational system from primary schools up through higher education, and to enhance what we do well while correcting what we do wrong.

Kristof focuses, in particular, on the contribution of good teachers:

First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher.

In my view, this is absolutely correct. And unless we can refashion our educational systems so that outstanding teachers are encouraged and rewarded, we will not make headway in the area of education.

As I've argued repeatedly on this blog, our educational system--in particular, American higher education--has restructured itself in the past several decades according to guidelines derived from the corporate business world (here). We now have a top-heavy educational system (at all levels) in which grossly overpaid "experts" with little feel for education and woefully inadequate commitment to outstanding education run the show. While teachers, who do the real work, and the hard work, of struggling to educate, are under-supported, used as pawns in cynical political games played by those at the top, and increasingly relegated to second-class citizenship in the academy.

It should not be this way. And until we fix this situation, we will continue to see conspicuous failure in our educational system. Good teaching needs to be rewarded. And there needs to be a weeding process at the top, at each level of our educational system, to deal with the over-paid and ill-qualified "managers" now running the show.

Arne Duncan as Education Secretary: Reflections on Obama's Cabinet Choices

I’ve been ho-hum about most of Mr. Obama’s cabinet appointments. But the choice of Arne Duncan as education secretary interests me and even gives me reason for muted hope. It’s not that any of the previous selections have struck me as particularly bad. They have just been unexciting.

Most seem sound enough, if weighted a bit more on the side of centrist expertise than I’d have hoped. And by “centrist,” I’m referring not only to the ideological orientation of the cabinet choices. I’m referring as well to the provenance of those being selected. They’re from the usual power centers of American society; they have the predictable educational pedigree of such selections. They represent, in other words, the very folks who have led us right to the brink of economic collapse—and that concerns me.

The appointment of Arne Duncan does grab my attention, though. I knew next to nothing about Duncan before the appointment. What I’m reading strikes me as hopeful. I like that he has managed to maintain positive ties to the teachers’ union in Chicago while running a major metropolitan school system. He supported the failed plan to start a high school for gay-lesbian youth in Chicago—a good plan for a valuable project, which should have been implemented.

And, according to today’s New York Times, Duncan is a strong advocate for an initiative dear to the new president’s heart—an enhanced early childhood education program for youth across the nation (www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/politics/17early.html?partner=p). This is an initiative we sorely need.

It’s no secret that the American educational system is in trouble—dire trouble. And at all levels. What seems to escape the attention of a public infatuated with scores “proving” that pupils can read, write, and cipher adequately (or proving the opposite, which is, unfortunately, more often the case) is that a good education is about more than acquiring basic skills.

It’s about entrée. It’s about ability to contribute in a participatory democracy. It’s about access to power and privilege in a society in which power and privilege (and the world’s goods) are inequitably distributed.

The most scandalous failure of our current educational system is its apparent inability to level the playing field by drawing the youth of marginalized communities inside. We have spent several decades lamenting the lack of basic skills among American students, and punishing educators and schools that work hard to inculcate those skills, while ignoring the most salient—the central and glaring—fact about our schools’ shortcomings. This is their inability to begin the process of educating youth on the margins at the critical early-childhood threshold—to begin the educational process in a way that draws these young folks into education and into the participatory structures of democracy for their entire lives.

Too many of our citizens are left outside. Too many of us not only live on the margins: we are left on the margins. We are left there by an educational system that does almost nothing to educate us, even when it graduates us and offers us degrees.

Early childhood education is critical because the early childhood phase is the make-or-break moment in the educational process. Fail to induct a youngster into the educational system at this threshold moment, and you’ve lost him or her for life. Society has lost this valuable citizen, and the talents this citizen brings to us, forever.

What strikes me as particularly promising about the choice of Arne Duncan for secretary of education is not so much his potential to address the manifold problems of our educational system. It’s his focus on what is the problem of the system, the core problem: its failure to reach children on the margins, particularly at the key moment of early childhood education.

The various educational reforms of recent neoconservative administrations have been, frankly, shell games. They have been shell games because they begin with the assumption that the most significant thing wrong with our educational system is its failure to teach basic skills. From there, they move to the punitive (and polarizing) assumption that schools should be rewarded or penalized on the basis of students’ scores on standardized tests.

What this neoconservative strategy entirely misses is the fact that many American students will never get to the point of meeting society's benchmarks in the areas of reading, writing, and doing math because they have not been reached at all by the educational system. Not, that is, in any way that counts, in any way that allows them to understand the importance of education to their entire lives. Not in any way that allows them to become educated.

They were not reached at the moment when reaching out and drawing in is most important: at the very beginning of their schooling. They will never be adequately taught, these students left behind, because our society and its schools have not cared enough to demonstrate to these marginalized young people their importance to all of us, as they begin their educations.

Until we address that social assumption—the assumption that we can live with marginality and do nothing about it—we will not being educating the majority of our citizens. Not adequately, that is.

And addressing that assumption is definitely going to take reform of how we train those who teach. The education departments of too many of our universities are, frankly, laughable. They are too often staffed by people too woefully uneducated themselves to educate any other human being.

And they are staffed that way from the top down. There are wonderful educators in many of our education departments. There are people in those departments who are willing to wear themselves out trying to reach students.

But these educators rarely control or even exercise much influence over the direction of schools of education. Instead, “professional” “educators” tend to predominate at the top of such departments—and at the helms of universities that sponsor schools of education. “Professional” as in trained—trained bureaucrats.

Many of those heading education departments and entire universities are people with doctorates in fields like education who are shockingly devoid of even the basics of education—of the depth and breadth of a liberal education that comprises wide reading, of interaction with educated people from many different schools of thought, and so forth. Too many professional educators approach the task of education as an administrative game. Too few understand it as what it is when it is done right: the challenge of reaching out and drawing in, particularly of reaching to and drawing in those on the margins.

Too many educators lack this perspective on what education is all about because their educational “training” has taught them to create nifty slide presentations or to crunch numbers in salary scales or how to craft a memo to avoid legal entanglements. But it has not taught them to understand how social structures work or how the human mind and heart function. The education of far too many educational bureaucrats is simply not education at all, in the classic sense of that term.

I hope that Obama and Duncan begin addressing these problems. It is high time that they do so. It is imperative that they do so, if we’re going to begin recovering our democracy.

Doing so will not be easy, however. It will require that they go up against the most powerful and least educated elites in our educational system—folks like the presidents and boards of trustees who run the universities. The folks who command the high salaries while assigning the hard work of education to shockingly underpaid and exploited faculty members such as those Gina Nahai discusses in a Huffington Post article earlier this week (www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-nahai/the-great-shame-of-americ_b_150940.html). (Here's where the good relationship with the Chicago teachers' union will be valuable: the "professional" educators at the top are there because, on the whole, they resist adequate pay for the real educators beneath them.)

As long as the system producing the "educators" who have failed to educate several generations of American youth remains in place, not much is going to change. Nothing much has changed as we have allowed—forced is a better word—our schools to play the numbers game with standardized scores while failing to reach scads of our youngsters in any meaningful way.

And nothing at all will change as long as we allow grossly overpaid, soulless—and yes, corrupt; corrupted by their privilege and power over others—educational “experts” to run our educational shows. How can someone who does not understand or value what his or her own soul says—who does not have the tools to do that, tools provided by a real education—touch the souls of others?

School Bullying: We Have Met the Bully; He Is Us

“Truth that makes a difference,” I wrote in my last blog entry. That’s the kind of truth I’m interested in discovering on this blog pilgrimage. That kind of truth requires doing battle—with oneself, first and foremost, so that one keeps pushing to expand one’s horizons when the human impulse is to close in on oneself and become comfortable with the familiar, with the well-worn little truths that comprise one’s grab-bag of certainties.

Discovering truth that makes a difference also requires collaborating with others who are battling for the truth. Truth is not just out there, to be plucked, like a fruit ripening on a tree. Truth has to be searched for and found. It has to be made. It has to be struggled for. Truth that makes a difference is the goal of dialogic exchange in which a community of truth seekers struggle together for the truth. Truth that makes a difference is agonistic: it is found at a certain cost, the cost of challenging the purveyors of misinformation that passes for truth in any society, the cost of struggling with oneself, and the cost of forming bonds of trust and collaboration with others.

Finding that kind of truth in the world in which we live is not easy. For one thing, many forces collude to rob us of the power of solidarity. Believe it or not, there are those—many “those”—who do not wish for us to find the truth. There are many power brokers for whom the solidarity of truth-seekers, the formation of communities of discourse seeking together the truth that makes a difference, is extremely threatening.

These power brokers do all they can to distort plain truth, so that the quest for truth is always fractured, always across a terrain full of crevices and boulders, never simple. They do all they can to sow seeds of suspicion among those who would, in the natural course of things, benefit from seeking together the truth that makes a difference. The power brokers who wish for the world to remain the same (since they benefit from how things are currently arranged), who try to stand astride history and shout stop—these power brokers do everything in their power to thwart the formation of communities of solidarity that band together to engage in a shared quest for truth that makes a difference.

I have been thinking about truth, solidarity, community, and social transformation lately, against the backdrop of questions about how to address school bullying. Even that conversation, about what seems such an obvious need, an urgent need, is fraught with complexity because of the inability of many of us to find common ground regarding issues of gender and education. The plain truth—that children ought not to be beaten into submission or to have their futures mortgaged because they do not conform to preconceived societal expectations about gender behavior—even this plain truth is not plain to many folks, because of political currents that have twisted and distorted our social lenses about gender roles and about the goals of education.

To be specific: I have been listening to responses of people in my own area to the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, school system. And I have been dialoguing with e-friends who share my concern about school bullying. As I listen and engage in dialogue, I notice some key issues surfacing, which ought not to demand attention, but which have to be discussed, because the right-wing talk machine has been so successful for so long now in distorting the consciousness of Americans about gender issues and the education of our youth, that we cannot see plain truth, and cannot discover the truth that makes a difference, as we look at the phenomenon of school bullying.

Some of those to whom I have been listening lately are asking whether the phenomenon of school bullying really is any different now—any more pronounced—than it was in the past. After all, as they point out, in schools all over the world, bullying of the “weaker” by the “stronger” has been going on from time immemorial. Are things really any worse now? Isn’t the process of taking boys who are prone to wear their feelings on their shoulders and toughening them up good for everyone concerned—for society, which needs men to be men, and for the bullied boys themselves, since they will live in an adult world that expects men to be men?

It’s not that these assumptions are always vocalized outright in discussion of what happens to boys such as Billy Wolfe. But they are the kind of strong unexamined social assumptions that make addressing school bullying difficult in American culture today. These are the unvocalized justifications that many school administrators and some parents use to shrug off school bullying: it goes on all the time; it has always gone on; it’s salubrious practice for real life, particularly for the “too sensitive” boy. Lighten up. Boys will be boys. Don’t intervene in the benign social Darwinism of the school playground, unless you want to tip longstanding scales that keep our social mechanisms functioning, and cause social chaos.

My own take on the bullying problem is that it probably has always been there, but is more serious today for a number of reasons. First, there's the rise in violence in schools (and society at large), and the ready availability of weapons. Grudges that used to be settled by a fistfight are now settled with knives and guns. The growing tacit social acceptance of violence as a way to resolve disputes in adult life, as well as in the lives of the young, when combined with the availability of weapons and the willingness of school children to use them, raises school bullying to an entirely new level at this point in history.

Then, too, the Internet has made communication—including communication in which bullies egg each other on and organize to target an individual—frighteningly easier. As the story of Billy Wolfe (and other recent stories of school bullying) indicates, websites, email, and other tools of e-communication are now being used to make school bullying more “effective” by far than it ever could be in the pre-Internet age. Posting a child’s picture on a website and goading others to hate him allows more and more people to join in the blood-sport of chastising the “weak” link in social chains of power. It allows the bullying to become organized, to extend beyond schools into every area of a youth’s life. It produces a new level of refined cruelty, in which a taunt can pop up in an email at any time, or leap out from a webpage on which the bullied person clicks.

And, finally, I think that there's a heightened awareness of gender and sexual orientation issues, again, partly due to the Internet. Youth today are more aware of their sexual orientation or more willing to explore gender variance at ever younger ages. To a degree almost unimaginable to us who grew up in a world in which the flow of information was confined to print media or the relatively localized media of television and radio, the Internet allows for instant worldwide communication about issues of gender and sexuality that permits ready access to information unavailable to youth in the past.

For many of those who have a vested interest in seeing rigid societal thinking about gender roles shift, this heightened information flow has seemed promising. What I think many of us have not anticipated, however, is the effect of that information flow on the lives of youth exploring gender identity, in a world in which the same information flow permits those opposed to questioning of traditional gender roles to organize.

LGBT youth, and youth questioning traditional gender roles, are now in a double bind. In a way previously unimaginable, they have access to information regarding sexual orientation and gender issues never before so readily available to youth. They also have ready access to information about others who have fought through these issues and become role models for LGBT youth today.

But their bullies also have access to information that permits them to organize, to target, to extend the taunts and threats to every area of a youth’s life. LGBT youth today experience increasing backlash precisely because there is, at one level, increasing ease about coming out. The easier the process of coming out becomes—on the surface—the more difficult it simultaneously becomes, because of the intent of organized groups full of hate to counteract the easy transmission of information about gender and sexual orientation in the Internet age.

I speak deliberately of “organized groups full of hate.” The real bullies, the real villains in the school bullying tragedy, are not first and foremost the youth who kick, hit, taunt, or shoot. The real bullies are the parents, school administrators, church groups, bogus therapists, ex-gay ministries, the media, and manifold right-wing think tanks that disseminate ugly, false information about the gay “lifestyle” and about gender roles to youth inclined to bully.

The problem of school bullying won’t be resolved effectively until the real bullies are exposed and addressed. As Alice Miller’s stunning reflections on how Western culture treats youth note, we are a culture saturated with belief in our extraordinary concern for our youth, who at the same time constantly murder the souls of our young people. Miller’s life-long study of the societal issue of violence towards the young convinced her that the flip side of our sentimental belief that we do everything to protect the young is that we ultimately care very little about the well-being of youth. The too-much protestation in which we engage hides the sordid reality that we do not truly care a great deal about the well-being of our youth.

As a society, we have long been callous about acts of violence perpetrated against the young right in the family circle—the key locale in which young people suffer assault. We do very little to protect young people from what Miller calls “soul murder”—the death of hope, of belief in oneself and one’s potential, the belief that one’s life counts and will make a difference in the world. Miller concluded, after years of exhaustive psychotherapeutic research, that even when youth are not physically assaulted in our culture, their souls are often subjected to murder, because we do so little to safeguard and cultivate the souls of the young.

As an educator, I have become increasingly convinced that something is very awry in our educational system, and that this dislocation of the goals of our educational system is intimately related to the murder of the souls of our youth. We do a decent enough job (in some cases, in some areas, depending on income levels and social status) of educating young people’s heads. We do a dismal job of educating their hearts, of cultivating their souls.

We cannot, in fact, cultivate the souls of youth when we do not cultivate our own souls. I am not talking about the soul here in classic religious terms. I am talking about what is inmost in a human person, what makes that person tick, about what shines forth inside a human being to make that person different from any other human being.

Though for some people this language has specific religious reference, for others it is a useful way to describe humanistic goals without reference to a specific religious tradition or any religious tradition at all. The language of soul need not be left out of our school system and our educational objectives on the ground that it has religious roots. It is a language that is also spoken by those who want to build a better world without necessarily adverting to religion at all.

Our educational system cannot speak the language of soul, or address the murder of the souls of our youth, or stop the problem of school bullying, because our educational leaders themselves too often lack soul. I have thought this for a long time, as an educator. I thought about this problem of lack of soul with a renewed interest yesterday, as I read Patrik Johnson’s article “Rise of the ‘Rock Star’ School Superintendent" in the Christian Science Monitor at
www.csmonitor.com/2008/0331/p01s03-usgn.html.

Johnson reports on a troubling phenomenon in American education today: the ascendancy of a generation (and class) of highly paid bureaucratic “educators” who administer schools, but who have little apparent interest in or understanding of education itself, and of the classic humanistic goals of education. The name of the game in American education today is, frankly, to beat the testing game. Schools—at every level, from kindergarten through higher education—must demonstrate tangible results in the form of test scores.

This impulse in American higher education has resulted in a system of scamming by which schools do all in their power to up test scores, without caring much about what students actually learn—or about who students become, in the educational process. Even worse, the need to scam results in the hire of more and more educational administrators who are, frankly, simply, appallingly soulless.

These administrators thrive in climates in which they can balance fiscal account books, even when doing so requires the same scams that delude people into thinking that test scores are rising. They thrive in climates of obfuscation of the truth, of half-truths, of deliberate lies to governing boards that are, increasingly, comprised of hard-nosed business leaders and not educators.

These “educators” are also highly paid, disgracefully so. The Monitor reports on one candidate for a position in a suburban Atlanta school system, whose demands prior to hire include not merely a very cushy salary (many times more than a teacher is paid), but a Lincoln town car, a chauffeur, and a personal bodyguard.

I speak of what I know. I speak of what I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears.

I know these “educators.” I have had to interact with them. I have tried to talk to them about educating youth, about shaping the character of future leaders, about cultivating the soul of youth. I have had no success in reaching these “educators.” Their interest is not in the soul. They are tone-deaf to the language of soul and character.

The increasing prevalence of these “rock-star” educators throughout the American system of education points to problems with the system itself—which is to say, problems with us. The Monitor article quotes Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, regarding what I am identifying as a loss of soul in American education today. Fluker says, "Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what's happening at deeper and more fundamental levels.”

I conclude from this observation that if the scam artists who are increasingly the rock-star “leaders” of our educational institutions thrive, it is because we allow them to thrive. The problem is us. We are the problem. We do not value our own souls or the souls of our youth.

Until we do so, we will not successfully make our schools places in which the souls of children—and the bodies of youth deemed gender-inappropriate—are safe from murder. We have met the enemy: he is us.