The Sage has Left the Building

For some years now, I’ve heard from administrators, professional-development presenters, “experts,” and others who’ve somehow been granted the privilege of influencing educational philosophy, policy, and culture that the idea of the “sage on the stage” teacher is passé. Some have gone further to hint or even say that the idea is anathema to student learning, that if you are a sage on the stage, then you’re willfully harming students. You’re out of date. You’re old fashioned. You probably believe in corporal punishment, tracking, and prizes for only first-place winners.

And I get it. Today’s generation needs something different than what they previously received. Engagement and buying-in, with the advent of so many other things more attractive than listening in a classroom, are necessary to gain access to a child’s desire to learn. It’s no longer there out in the open unless it’s been cultivated from an early age. And our culture doesn’t value education enough to prepare our children for a lifetime of it.

But in this area we’ve done what humans tend to do when changing courses: we’ve torn down everything that’s come before us. We’ve decided in our hubris that our way is best and those in the past were short-sighted. We view the past with incredulity at how the world managed to continue to spin while accommodating all the stupid human beings on it. We don’t utilize one of the basic tenets of higher order thinking that we as educators are supposed to incorporate in our teaching: synthesis. We seem to be fundamentally unable to reconcile the mixture of failure and success of past practices with change and improvement for the future.

I am the sage on the stage. While I incorporate many of the facets of a “21^st Century Classroom” (a fine piece of fascist jargon, since if you’re not using any of these, you’re outmoded, out-dated, dead), such as collaborative learning, integrated technology, and others, I firmly remain the smartest human being in the classroom. And I dispense that intelligence. My authority as an educator comes from what I know, and I’ve spent over half my life so far becoming an expert. When my English class in high school didn’t read any novels and read only excerpts of Shakespeare, I read classic after classic. In college, I read every single reading assignment, all while still always reading a novel for pleasure (and often my pleasure reading was David Foster Wallace or a translation of Beowulf). I read and write and fully immerse myself in my field every day of my life. I am an English teacher. When I enter my classroom, I bring with me everything I’ve learned, everything that a careful study of the subject has brought me. And since I teach English, which lends itself to is cross-curricular study, I’ve opened my interests to many other fields. I teach history and science and math and current events and morality and ethics and a host of other things in my English class. And because my students require that, I read that stuff. I read and read and read. I intake and intake and intake. So that when I stand in front of my class, all that I’ve vacuumed up comes out.

I know the image the phrase “sage on the stage” conveys. It’s the teacher standing above the students dispensing wisdom unrelated to anything going on in the child’s life or to the educational goals of the school/county/state/federal government/humanity. It’s the teacher holding a fire hose hooked up to a hydrant of their own wisdom, intelligence, experience, and shortcomings and spraying this dearly-beheld mixture indiscriminately across the room. Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that’s what a lot of teachers did. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Why can’t we take all that we’ve learned about educating children, and all that we need from our children as they grow up to be adults in our current (and future) world, and incorporate it into a respected expert who educates our children?

My mind immediately answers that question and it immediately goes to those involved in education policy who shouldn’t be – bureaucrats; politicians; corporations; etc. – and how those who seek to grasp the power that a public education system provides need to minimize other groups who can also have that power, here: teachers. According to today’s current wisdom, I am a facilitator, one who guides rather than leads. I do believe that is part of my job, but above all, I lead. Because if I – the adult in the classroom, the one who has relentlessly studied my subject, the one who has doggedly pursued the craft and art of teaching, the one who has had more life experience and more life experience filtered and shaped towards the end of becoming a Teacher – do not lead, what will?