Teachers have a vital role to play

Teachers have a vital role to play in shaping the lives of their young charges, says St Francis Bay freelance journalist Beth Cooper Howell in her Woman on Top column today A few years ago, I wrote a Facebook post about the impact of teachers – and others in positions of authority – on children: “We tend to forget what an impact our words may have – especially on the young.”

I vividly recall my school principal and then English teacher, Natalie Stear, stopping me in the corridor one morning to have a chat.

“Beth,” she said, in her gracious, serious manner, “I feel very strongly that you must go on to study English and possibly journalism. It’s vital that you expand on this skill of yours. I have great faith in you”.

She had much to do and I was one of hundreds of pupils milling the corridor that day; but she knew, as only the wisest of teachers do, that her words would have impact.

And they did. I try to remember that whenever I engage with teenagers and children.

As is often the case, we scarcely realise how deeply connected we are by universal issues.

Comment after comment streamed in, with passionate remembrances of similar “Mrs Stear” figures, or the opposite experience – teachers, parents and bosses who trampled aspirations, fostering the negative, and ignoring the positive.

I was overwhelmed by how intense these respective memories were. Some of them were more than 40 years old. It was a floodgate.

One woman, now a comfortably successful businesswoman, remembered her maths teacher telling her that she would never be more than a “check-out girl”; another recalled being slapped with a ruler at the age of nine for getting a times-table sum wrong – 10 slaps on each hand for her mistake.

Society, for myriad reasons, has an ingrained sense of bowing to authority – whatever the cost.

When one is presented with true, inner authority (as we, Mrs Stear’s pupils, were), there is a sense of rightness in the world. We willingly follow, rather than blindly. We happily learn and grow rather than being coerced to do so under whip-threat.

Generally, though, we struggle to find genuine leadership despite our collective agreement that it exists, must be so, and is the bedrock of a functioning humanity.

Leaders such as Mrs Stear are as rare as blue roses.

I felt sad that so many of my friends had suffered at the hands of broken people thrust into positions of power, where they were able to dictate their own dogma, knowing that the universally-accepted fact of being “boss” or “principal” or “parent” gave them a head-start – and the upper hand.

John Baines in his book The Stellar Man says that in order to analyse a person’s true character and individual value, “we must always divest him of all the honours, dignities, inheritances, authority and privileges which society has conferred on him. Unfortunately, our analysis will be very discouraging as in the majority of cases we will not find within this ‘inflated’ being the human being which this covering hides. [A] human being always hides beneath numerous masks and disguises, as thus he can go about without revealing his absolute insignificance”.

Perhaps, as Baines asserts, the smaller an individual is, the more he must “inflate” himself to appear important.