Stop Doing Everything

The United States of America is going through some immense cultural changes, the likes of which have not been seen since the social and political movements of the 1950s and 60s, with generations of people are waking up to decades of deep-rooted issues that routinely challenge the fate of America’s survival as a solitarily united nation. Teachers play a peculiar role amidst this turbulent, internationally polarized climate, having to justify their roles as educators upon unfair accusations of indoctrination and continually implementing differing methods of addressing vitally important and relevant matters within the comprehensive development of their academic curriculum. So, how are teachers expected to satisfy an increasingly concerned parent population while at the same time navigating this turbulent socio political landscape? As a developing teacher, and through the education I have received as a student of history and secondary education at Lake Forest College, I have developed a personal philosophy of education (a mantra, one could say) that advises the reader to take a single action to promote a clearer state of thinking and a deeper sense of understanding the source of their thoughts: stop doing everything. The aim of this message is to help you feel better capable of confronting complex challenges with a firm sense of inner self-support. Allow me to guide you, dear reader, through the development of my philosophy of education and explore its usefulness, not only as an epistemological inquiry on meaning itself, but in its practicality as a classroom philosophy.