An English Teacher’s Manifesto

Grab yourself an extra big bowl of Revolutionary-O’s, kiddies, because the Colonel has sounded the rallying cry.

Why do we teach English? A simple question whose answer is immensely important. And anyone that teaches English needs to give a satisfactory answer or my Death Squads will be at your classroom tomorrow. “I like teaching” and “I like to read” and “I always liked English” are not acceptable. In fact, they’re juvenile and downright silly. Purge yourself and your teaching of juvenility and silliness.

The answer needs to be considered by everyone that teaches English. A student in America is taught the English language from the first time he sets foot in a daycare/preschool/kindergarten until the end of high school or the beginning of college. For about thirteen to fifteen years, depending on college attendance, every child in America receives English language training every year. Think about that. True, there are other core subjects students are harassed with every year, but without English, they don’t matter. I’m being serious here and not merely engaging in the-all-importance-of-English bravado. Math is a language in and of itself, but try teaching it without words. The retail clerks of this country would be even more inept, more reliable on the calculators in their trusty registers. Everything we do, everything we are, everything we believe, everything we try to communicate to others is through language. So we teach English because language is the single most powerful and beautiful thing we have.

You need power. I need power. Think about power as the means to accomplish something. Someone with political power is able to set the agenda in numberless areas of the lives of whom they serve. President Obama has political power and examples of him exercising it are in the news everyday. Someone with financial powers is able to do things those without it cannot. An example struck me tonight. In tonight’s (September 3rd) sky, you can clearly see Jupiter near the moon. At 9:45 pm, Jupiter’s Red Spot can be seen with a telescope. Think of how many people can’t afford a telescope. Those that can are afforded a spectacular opportunity to enrich their lives by being able to see a distinct feature on a planet between 390 million and a 5765 million miles away (depending on Jupiter and the Earth’s orbits). Almost a billion miles! I want to sit in an unfurnished room without windows and just think about it. Heady stuff. But I digress.

So those with power are able to accomplish things. Most of us do not attain great power. We’re not all presidents or senators or members of the wealthy class. But we can have it. It takes a certain amount of power for a person to educate themselves and get a job that enhances their lives. For example, a person graduates high school, attends college, and gets a job that allows them to live independently. That’s power. And how many people do you know that achieve more than their parents did? Those that graduate college, or get a job in a field more prestigious than their parents? I know of many, and I’m sure you do to. And that’s power.

Now as that relates to language, someone that does not possess the power of language will never attain power in other areas. Here’s not the place to discuss those in power who seem to have a very narrow hold on language. Our former and current presidents are horrible speakers (Obama’s as bad as Bush when he doesn’t have his teleprompter), but that’s only one aspect of language. The ability to think clearly, rhetorically, and critically are powers of language that don’t often come through in a person’s speech. Both Bush and Obama clearly have these powers. But here is the place to discuss the person who travels through our educational system and never achieves the powers of reading, writing, and thinking. What future is left to those deprived of these powers? Quite simply it’s an unfulfilling future, one filled with poverty and/or various types of hustling (and by various types I mean both legal and illegal. A person working more than one minimum-wage job, one working a job that pays more than the minimum wage but not what we would call a living wage, and one who resorts to illegal enterprises, whether it be something rather benign like selling bootleg DVDs or bottled water on the street corner, or something more sinister like selling drugs or committing robberies, are all on the same level. Their income is rather stagnant at a lower level and hopes of bettering their lives are minimal.

Let’s get back to our original question: why do we teach English? The answer should be that we teach English because it is beautiful, it is power conveyed to the heretofore powerless, and because it is our passion. It is what we breathe and eat and drink. We don’t read for pleasure. We read for the same reason the heroin addict screws over a loved one for the next fix. We write, we think, and we shake our fist at a world that needs correction, that needs a better distribution of power. We live and teach English because no one in this world cares about you, no one in this world will give you what you need. The government won’t make you a better person. It can’t improve your lot in life. But if you can read well, write well, think well, you, the Individual, can change fate and history and every other entity that seems created to destroy you.

So my fellow English teachers, and really all teachers, administrators, and anyone else in the education field: If you don’t love it and live it, get out. If you’re an English teacher because you like to read silly pop books by the likes of Dan Brown and other useless hacks, get out. If you’re an administrator and you shackle the creative minds of passionate English teachers, get out. I could go on through the rolls of the Hated Ones, but the point is simply this: I call for all true teachers to spurn, hate, mock, disregard, and ostracize those that smear our profession, those that are not passing on power to the powerless. You are the chaff, and the fire will consume you.

The Revolution has begun.