"Let not many of you become teachers"

I just read of another teacher who has been arrested for an improper sexual relationship with a student.  Seems like every week another report of impropriety, or even depravity, on the part of one teacher or another gets spread abroad on the news.  I hate to hear it.  Such reports, if frequent enough, make a person believe that the whole profession has lost its integrity.  If you can’t trust your child’s teacher, then who can you trust, right?

But there’s another view of this picture.  We hear about the bad apples because that’s what makes for sensational news.  We more rarely hear stories about the overwhelming number of teachers who, day in and day out, sacrifice themselves for the sake of the children they nurture.  We all have an inherent agreement to the scriptural instruction, “Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness (James 3:1).”  We tend to believe this in our bones rather than in our heads, which is why even those who are not people of faith nonetheless feel some sort of moral indignation when a teacher betrays the public trust.

But again, the overwhelming majority of teachers are credits to their profession; wonderful nurturers and protectors of children.  Teachers today have to be skilled at many roles – teacher, counselor, social worker and, recently, human shield.  The heroic actions of Newtown teachers who put themselves between Adam Lanza’s murderous rampage and the children they were called to teach have been well documented.  Now, in the wake of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado of this past Monday, we hear more stories of teachers who were found cradling, or embracing children, in attempts to protect them from the storm that destroyed their school.

In these days when politicians are cutting state budgets with sometimes self-righteous ruthlessness, teachers and education have been “judged with greater strictness,” to twist the scripture just a bit.  The loss of tax revenues necessitates cuts, of course.  However, I don't believe educators should be the target of the scissors.  I'm just not sure you can ever pay teachers too much.  They hold in their hands our children and what they will become.  Our teachers are shaping the future.  They deserve our respect.  They deserve our gratitude.  They deserve to be compensated.  As CNN columnist L.Z. Granderson wrote this week, On a typical day teachers do more than enough to be fairly compensated without being unfairly vilified by budget cutters.  “But on a day that's not so normal, we hope and pray that they are willing to do much more. And time and time again, in the face of terrible tragedies, we have learned that many of them do.” (http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/21/opinion/granderson-oklahoma-teachers/index.html)