By Donna Hruska

If you want to understand the younger generation’s social concern, visit a school. There is something different about schools these days. Not just my children’s school, but institutions all over the country have changed. They don’t even smell the same. The old odor of chalkdust that we remember is lost in the new scents of learning—popcorn popping in a little room off the kindergarten to illustrate to five-year-olds how their sense of smell helps them to know, the smell of healthy animals in a primary room where the students learn biology by observing, the odors of fresh cut wood and motor oil in a sixth grade classroom where boys learn the practicality of mathematics and science by building and repairing machines. It smells exciting, challenging, and the visitor wants to sit down and watch and learn.

The big difference in this revolution is not methods—it is teachers.

They are so enthused, so vibrant, so full of hope. In my day, which wasn’t so long ago, teachers often patted the good children on the head, sent the bad ones to stand in the hall, and wrote off the dumb ones. The course of study started at the beginning of the book and worked straight through. Of course, there were those teachers who were inspiring and whom everybody loved, but they so often left for better paying jobs. Those kind of people are always in demand. With more money now, they can stay.

These teachers are so young—and I do not necessarily mean in years. They enjoy children and they care. That is the most remarkable part—they care. They care enough to try to find out why the problem child misbehaves and why the slow child fails to learn. They are not always successful. The non-readers still sometimes slip by them. The problems of their students are sometimes insurmountable; but the miracle is that the next year they are back, trying again to overcome the odds, still enthused and still caring.

Sometimes I wonder—is this another aspect of the generation gap? I was a member of the “silent generation,” the graduates of the fifties. As well as I remember, most of us were concerned largely with what our starting salaries would be when we got out. We were in a hurry to make it big, and few of us were thinking about what we could do for others. But these teachers—they are a whole different breed. True, some of them graduated with me in that less altruistic decade, but it is the spirit of the young, this new generation of doers, that moves them, challenges them, inspires them to greater service. Too often we get hung up on the marchers, the dissenters who tear down without offering

to build up, but somewhere out there are the vast majority of young adults who were students in the sixties. They never sat in or copped out, but their consciences were stirred, and most of them have dedicated their lives to something more worthwhile than tomorrow’s newest color TV set. I’m proud to know them and glad that my children are growing up under their influence.

There is a sixth-grade teacher I know who is a full-blooded American Indian. He uses that fact to full advantage—first to snare the students’ interest, then to make them aware of social justice and history—but most of all he is a Teacher. He is aware that this is the last year these children will go to school in the closed cocoon of the same classroom all day. Next year they will be on their own in Junior High School, passing from class to class, with no one to repeat the math assignment for the third time, no teacher to check to see if they are taking the right books home. He prepares them. He teaches them how to study, how to be responsible for themselves and how to help their fellow students. They leave his room confident of their own ability to organize their own school life and the adjustment to a new situation is not so hard for them.

I know another teacher who catches the love and interest of her first graders with a guitar and uses that advantage to stuff them with words and numbers and the fun of learning.

Still another teacher sees life through a veil of laughter. He tells his students funny stories, outrageous jokes and plays harmless but hilarious practical jokes on them until, weakened with laughter, they find themselves learning lessons that previously held no appeal.

I know a teacher who cares so much that she cannot leave the problems of her students at school, but takes them home with her, searching until she finds the key that will unravel a child’s despair. She has taken neglected children to museums on her own free time. She has given love to children who had none. She cares.

And in a certain second grade room, a teacher who is younger in spirit than some of those half her age, walks with a limp while her beauty shines out through laughing eyes. She always requests the slow learners’ reading group because “it’s only that they weren’t quite ready to start school at six and it’s such a joy to watch them blossom and unfold.” They do bloom in her class because she bathes them in praise and encouragement until each is convinced that he “really is the smartest kid in the whole second grade.” At the end of the year, they leave her reluctantly, but with confidence in themselves.

I know a school principal who ends his morning announcements over the loud speaker every day with “Remember, be kind to each other.”

Yes, students care today, because they have been cared about. Their teachers have a new approach—not new to the world, but a new and general application of an old principle of learning. It’s spelled L-O-V-E.

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Donna Hruska
2711 2nd Private Road
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422

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