Quote Me if I'm Wrong

Chapter Three: Meditations on Then, Now, and Next

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

-Aristotle

I have studied on the art of government as Aristotle suggested, not that I went so far as to have meditated on the thought, but I have skimmed over the basic principals of the ideal.

In my studies I have found that it takes a bit more wisdom than just to skim over the pages of a library book, put the book back on the self (perhaps in the wrong place), and then to think that you have immediately absorbed the talent to work what is a school. If learning the art of teaching could come form the pages of a loved and revered text many would have taken to this profession instead of attributing themselves to their true callings.

The mind of a child is a vulnerable and delicate thing; it can be shifted by the simplest of whims, moved by a word, a motion, a painless slap across the wrist. One does not play volley with the mind of a child, for a child will one day achieve the state of adulthood, and while that may not be an improvement, the things learnt in the state of childhood make us who we are as the future.

I do not expect my students to realize who they will become, and possibly what they will do with who they become. If I just told them what to do, as they wish, they would be lost along the way, and people lost on a path tend to take a stroll off the path towards the forest where the Big Bad is patiently waiting.

By Big Bad I am not referencing the newly risen Voldemort. I am speaking metaphorically. While my previous pupil may be the ultimate of many who walk my halls, the supreme Big Bad I am talking of is the person inside who will bite you as you stumble through the darker cervices of the mind. That Big Bad is the inner suppression of your evil. Please do not attempt to stifle me, you have an inner evil, as do we all, even I. For everything that is of this world has an opposite, an alternate, the extreme adverse force.

Life and Death. Light and Dark. Good and Evil. Up and Down. In and Out. Plus and Minus. Left and Right. Positive and Negative. Sour and Sweet.

See it all has contrary vibrations. Inside of you alone, in one singular persona, the wavelengths are extraordinarily diverse. A part of you can feel the bad and will instantly battle against your conscious. As your angel is whispering into your right ear the devil is always wielding his pitchfork. (More commonly known and thought of as a trident, but I'm a slightly biased and am not giving evil that nice of a weapon name).

Even the most amazing of those in and out of notable and respectable history had the soul battles on a probable basis of regularity. The farthest minds of the past battled within themselves, questioning every choice, asking because they knew what they moved for was what went down on the books, and they knew that history repeats.

Godric had daily mental duels in witch he pondered how best to deal with the impending opportunity his best friend had of leaving this world, the world they had developed, and then been joined upon by two others.

After him, Socrates faced the prejudices of a nation. He was a man of absolutes. He had absolute good, and that battled his absolute evil. He possessed an absolute life, until his sipped his way to an absolute death. A man of numbers and the total, the supreme, you have to respect a man who could deify the opposites, a man who could do neither more nor no less than the one way.

For the entirely long distance of my life and for the majority of that time I have been studying the art of education. In my quest for the greatest knowledge of knowledge I have found that academically discovered ends will not always discover the future.

Students have had to be the ones to teach me these ideals. I have a boy who just uplifted a burden on to shoulders already wracked in despair, and he is if nothing not trying to surmount a false façade. I know he is wallowing in what I am calling self-pity, a state of mind I do not approve of, but if hero he must be then a hero he must form, and apparently to become what you are reluctant to become you have to do and face what you did not see coming.