Teaching is the most important role in society

Teaching is important because, as I mentioned earlier, it influences future leaders. It is said that "the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world" and that is true of teaching. Those who mold children when they are young are laying the foundations for the adult. C.S. Lewis (a famous author and a good friend of Tolkien) was very influenced by his teachers. One of his teachers at a very bad boarding school taught him to hate learning and to live in fear of caning. This experience laid the foundation for "The Silver Chair" where his characters endured a lot of bullying. In contrast, his tutor Mr. Kirkpatrick, taught him precise words and thought in a method that he would use with his own students. (Stories from "The Storyteller; by Derick Bingham. Published in 1999) Another example of a teacher with great influence was Annie Sullivan, who taught Helen Keller. Helen Keller, with the skills she learned from Annie was able to help many blind and deaf children. Helen Keller International says: "Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880. When she was only 19 months old, she contracted a fever that left her blind and deaf. When she was almost seven years old, her parents engaged Anne Mansfield Sullivan to be her tutor. With dedication, patience, courage and love, Miss Sullivan was able to evoke and help develop the child's enormous intelligence. Helen Keller quickly learned to read and write, and began to speak by the age of 10. When she was 20, she entered Radcliffe College, with Miss Sullivan at her side to spell textbooks " letter by letter " into her hand. Four years later, Radcliffe awarded Helen Keller a Bachelor"s degree magna cum laude. After graduation, Helen Keller began her life's work of helping blind and deaf-blind people. She appeared before state and national legislatures and international forums, traveled around the world to lecture and to visit areas with a high incidence of blindness, and wrote numerous books and articles. She met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson, and played a major role in focusing the world's attention on the problems of the blind and the need for preventive measures. Miss Keller won numerous honors, including honorary university degrees, the Lions Humanitarian Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and election to the Women's Hall of Fame. During her lifetime, she was consistently ranked near the top of "most admired" lists. She died in 1968, leaving a legacy that Helen Keller International is proud to carry on in her name and memory." (http://www.hki.org...) All of this could not have happened if Annie Sullivan had not taught Helen how to communicate with the world. Another famous teacher was Socrates. Socrates taught Plato, and Plato's works have influenced western thought for centuries. Even Adolf Hitler recognized the great impact teachers had on society and twisted them for his own purposes to groom children for service in his regime. The History learning site says: "Adolf Hitler considered education to be a very important factor in Nazi Germany. When he wrote "Mein Kampf" while serving out a prison sentence at Landsberg, Hitler wrote "whoever has the youth has the future". In Hitler"s Germany, education would be the key that ensured that he had "the youth" of Germany. Hitler"s view on education was that it served a sole purpose " to ensure that a child was loyal to the Nazi state to ensure that the Third Reich lasted for 1000 years." (http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...) Those who want to control society first control the schools. Soviet Russia also used this fact to advantage: "In the Soviet period, education was highly centralized, and indoctrination in Marxist-Leninist theory was a major element of every school's curriculum." (http://countrystudies.us...) The Soviets used the schools to brain-wash the children to become blind leaders of the state. But why is teaching so influential? Susan Wise Bauer, a home-school educator, as well as a professor at the College of William and Mary, describes three stages of learning for a child: the grammar stage, the logic stage, and the rhetoric stage. The grammar stage covers grades Kindergarten to Fourth grade. During this time: "The immature mind is more suited to absorption than argument. The critical and logical faculty simply doesn't develop until later on. The typical second grader will take great joy in singing the latest television commercials to you word for word but will stare at you slack-jawed if you ask him why the advertiser wants him to buy the product, or what the merits of the product are, or whether it's reasonably priced. There is nothing wrong with a child accumulating information that he doesn't yet understand. It all goes into the storehouse for use later on." (The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wises Bauer and Jessie Wise. Copyright 2009) In the Logic stage, this phenomenon is lessened as the child learns to think critically. In the Rhetoric stage, the child learns to adequately express their opinions. But the reason why teaching is so key is what is learned in the Grammar stage. In those early years, what a child learns is critical, because he or she will not question it and merely accept it. That is why indoctrinating school-children is easy. They believe everything you tell them. A child is like clay, when they are young, they are easily molded under a teacher's influence, but when they get older, they begin to be less mold-able and more likely to hold their own shape instead. What has been imprinted on them in the early years will influence them in the later ones. That is why a teacher's role is so key. He or she has the power to shape society. And that power is formidable indeed.