Those who go by the title of teacher and feel they have done their job because they have shown up to a classroom on time and spent their day dispersing the ideology of the school administration, passing on mere information to students, and assessing those student’s understanding and recall of said information before they clock out and leave for the day are deceiving themselves. They are not teachers. They are hirelings and fall dangerously short of the calling to teach. A teacher is something else.
Teachers are shepherds and their classrooms safe green pastures of nourishment and cool streams of refreshment surrounded by ancient, mysterious, and undeniably sublime mountains of knowledge. Their students are sheep who fear no evil for they rightly sense their shepherds are experienced and knowledgeable. Moreover, the clear instructions and expectations of the shepherd comfort them.
Teachers are brave but humble guides who wisely lead their students into these dangerous mountains of knowledge via the ancient paths of virtue. Some of their greatest joys are pointing out the important historic landmarks to remember, the dangerous pitfalls to avoid, and singing to their students the glorious poetry of nature and number, time and space, and letter and speech. If teachers do well, their students sing back to them in kind and their young, harmonious voices dance across the alpine lakes and echo through the forests of knowledge delighting the faeries and the elves.
Teachers are also priests who continually make intercession for their students, knowing full well that as they journey further up and further in they must pass through the valley of the shadow of death. Here they will awaken dragons! They also know some unfortunates, believing they know the paths better than the shepherd, will slip away, wander over the steep cliffs of folly, and plunge headlong to their demise. Still others, they fear, even those who stay close by the shepherd, may ascend these glorious heights of knowledge, learn the paths well, memorize the poetry, and master the rhetoric only to leave the virtuous paths and become more clever devils.
Teachers are not mere dispensers of knowledge. They are something else. Teachers are shepherds. Teachers are guides. Teachers are priests.
