Ripped Education

About 5 years ago I saw a college professor at a training event surrounded by his students.  I was with another group at the time, but as I was leaving the event, I noticed that this professor remained behind with his students.  Every adult in the room was either leaving or if they worked on the event, hurrying up to take down things and pack them away so they can get home. 

I was fascinated that in the distance his students paid attention to his every word.  He was holding a debriefing session with them and they were absorbing and reflecting on what it is they learned during the day.  To say I was impressed is an understatement, but it was thoroughly unforgettable.  Our group were all working age adults and none of them would sit five minutes to reflect on what they learned, for them the purpose of the training was to earn a credit and it was what they were expected to do, because it is what every other group in that room did.

A couple of years later I was in a room of executives that represented the function of education and this college professor was at that meeting.  It is there I realized that not only was he giving man, but he was a good man, an honest individual who spoke several languages and someone who made a difference in the lives of his students.  It was later when I got to know him better that I was equally fascinated to watch alumni actually pay him a visit, some even called him "Professor" - and all had a deep respect for the difference he made in their lives.

That is what he enjoyed and that is why I decided to team up with him and for the last two years he has proven to be much more than even I had envisaged and I had a high opinion of the man.  So it is that I was utterly perplexed this morning when I received an announcement that he and his educational establishment had parted ways.  I do not know what happened or what the nature of the disagreement was but in a flash I was hit with something quite unexpected.

If it was an amicable separation I could be more forgiving, but I could see the control in the words this professor used in informing three of us of today's news.  It was clear that he now needs time to process this but what got me so mad today, so vexed and angry is that this situation came to a head just days before the whole nation will be celebrating Canada Day and not just any Canada Day - Canada's 150th Anniversary of Federation.   No matter what that educational establishment can say about its 21st Century practices, this was a medieval a situation as I have seen in comparison to the worst practices in the corporate world. 

Getting stripped of all your credentials when you are also a man who students greatly respected days before everyone else will be celebrating the nations big day, what kind of people deem to call themselves educators to apply this kind of timing and as a organization which gets so much of it's financing from the government purse, as well as endowments, what would possess such show of brazen insensitivity to pick this time to illicit this kind of situation.

Was there ever a time when the best educators could be left to do what they love and what students recognize as education?  I know these petty halls of politics exist in places of higher education but I never personally came across the brutal realities of how power is exercised and who the casualty of these realities are or how searing the stripping of an educator can actually be.  The only thing that was reassuring was that I had not chosen a career that put me in line of fire, as the kind I saw unfold today. 

Immediately today I began withdrawing my support for projects that the educational establishment valued highly and that now no longer interested me, not because of the vicious swiftness of how events played out but that a sensitive man, well loved as an educator now endures a cruel number of days, at a time when there is celebration in the air and a sense of national pride, a significant moment in the citizenship of a country.  These are values that I thought educators would be at the forefront of representing, but they were not - they were too busy in some kind dispute or situation to care at all about the significance of timing.  

The situation came out of left-field, leaving me feeling cold and empty.  If the person deposed was the good guy then who was left behind that won the day?  Then the day itself started to merge with all the stories of educators who have carried R.I.P. Education, who have tried to use their voices against the harshness and hostile world inside education.  I was not even close to this situation and far removed from the corridors in which this decision was taken, but it was still a bone chilling moment because today a good man tried his best to say the minimum necessary that he was no longer a part of that educational establishment and had the good grace not to draw attention to the establishment or say one bad word against it.

Yet I am no fool and I have as empathetic an understanding of the degree of nature of hurt, just like a doctor asking a patient out of 10 how much did something hurt.  I could sense an empathetic 9 out of 10, though this good man was trying not to convey the depth of his hurt. Here I was on a Wednesday and all round me people were preparing for some kind of event or another.  How do you celebrate your nations anniversary - the 150th when these things play out in a ham fisted way? 

The people who came to this decision are meant to be the light for the 21st Century but all I could see was the extent of their darkness and to think how it is that this could possibly be called "education".  When I look, I begin to find story after story of similar moments and then I am not surprised why some teachers have left the system.  There has to be more wisdom to education than this - if only the sense of decorum that is called timing.  Do I remind myself that this happened to a good man whose students revere him, now out in the cold for matters that could have waited until the rest of the nation had finished its celebration?