The Purpose of High School Education: An Essay

High school is a playground for intellectual adults, full of budding young minds waiting to come to full bloom or to be exploited. In Dead Poets Society, Welton Academy is one such environment. Principal Nolan and all but one teacher chose the exploitation route, raising up the boys of Welton to be robotic clones of themselves and their constricted and limiting ideology. One new teacher at Welton, however, took the road less traveled by. His name was John Keating, and he taught English at Welton. For the duration of his career at Welton, he taught the boys to think for themselves. This, not Nolan's way, is the purpose of high school. Unfortunately, society is permeated with the dingy filth of Nolan and the Nolanites, and we Keatingites are few and far between.

The Nolanites of society teach conformity to society. They despise individualism, because it is different. In Dead Poets Society, Principal Nolan has a talk with Mr. Keating that shows this attitude quite efficiently. Nolan tells Keating that some teachers and parents have complained about his "unorthodox" teaching methods and that he should stick to the Welton script. Keating says to Nolan, "I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself." Nolan replied, "At these boys' age? Not on your life!" Nolan recognizes that all people should think for themselves, but only after they reach that age where their minds can no longer be freed. Raise them up as programmed robots first, and they will never be free of thought. They will only, like Nolan, think they are.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have your Keatingites. For us, education is about freedom: sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau would say. Conformity is a disease that kills individualism and keeps a mind in bondage with the cold and heavy chains wrought by society. In Dead Poets Society, Keating has a student read the introduction of their poetry textbooks by J. Evans Pritchard. In it, Pritchard talks about "rating" poetry on a scale. Poetry must "follow the rules," according to people like Pritchard and Nolan. But as Mr. Keating did in Dead Poets Society, we must stand on our desks and remind ourselves "that we must constantly look at things in a different way."

Finally, you have your in-betweens. You have your Todd Andersons. At first, Todd stuck with conformity and the Nolanites, but he yearned to join the Keatingites. He just didn't know how. When Mr. Keating showed up, however, Todd discovered that it was quite simple: dream and look and think. As Thoreau said, "to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."

Show me the heart unfettered with foolish dreams, and I will show you a man in bondage. For only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be. Stand on your desk and look all around you. There is so much worthless stuff in this life. "What good amid these"? "That we are here - that life exists, and identity." The show must go on and everyone of us can contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Thinking Like A Child: The Monsters

Many times, little children will fear the monsters in their closets and under their beds. Those of us who have grown past that age just write it off as the child’s vivid imagination at work. But, what if it goes much deeper than that? What if their imagination only gives a recognizable form to the “monster”?

Children are innocent. That much is clear. Up until a certain age, they haven’t got an evil bone in their body. Innocence. Complete and total innocence. The physical representation of the Heart of G-d. But pure and total innocence doesn’t have a form, does it? Enter one of the greatest writers on the planet, the man who gave a form to both pure good (innocence) and pure evil. He offers these two forms in a story about a man. We’ll call him Jack. Jack is a man who grew up in a home where his aunt creates a world she believes is free from evil. Throughout his life with his aunt, he faced psychological abuse. That is, until he met a girl we’ll call Sandra. They were eleven when they met. Not long after they meet, Jack sneaks out one night and goes to her house. When he arrives, he sees something that horrifies him. A boy of maybe thirteen or fourteen with a dagger tattooed on his forehead is LICKING Sandra’s window!

The boy discovers Jack and smacks him around a little, then threatens to kill Jack and Sandra. Jack runs. Sometime later, about a month or so, Jack sees the boy again. This time, Jack runs and leads the boy to the city’s warehouse district. Inside one of the abandoned warehouses. Down some stairs. Into a room. It’s dark. “Hello, puke!” The boy is there! He and Jack fight, Jack bolts out of the room and shuts the door, locking it behind him. Four months later, Jack believes the boy to be dead.

Fast-forward twenty years. Sandra is now an accomplished agent with the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Jack is going through seminary and is quite the philosopher. Then, Jack gets a call from a man we’ll call Rick Darige. Darige tells Jack he has three minutes to confess his sins or his car will blow up. Jack hangs up and drives off the road. Sure enough, his car explodes. This puts him and Sandra on a turbulent race against Darige. In the end, Jack discovers that Sandra and Darige are not real – Sandra is Jack’s creation to represent (embody) pure goodness and innocence while Darige is Jack’s creation to represent (embody) pure evil and wickedness. Neither Sandra or Darige exist physically, yet Jack saw them both physically.

Let’s step out of that story now. This, I believe, is an excellent representation of my point. See, children are very much like Jack, and it is their innocence that makes them so. Those monsters they fear at night, the ones they see in their closets and under their beds? Those children are seeing the physical (to them) embodiment of evil – but they don’t know what evil looks like, so they give it a familiar form – a monster.

Alternatively, the imaginary friends they create when they are alone and afraid. These imaginary friends are the child’s physical embodiment of pure good. Together, the child and his/her imaginary friend fight off the “monster”, just as Jack and his imaginary friend, Sandra, fought off the monster, Darige.

Tanis vs. Qurong: The Dekker Mystery

*SPOILER WARNING!!!*

If you've ever read the Circle Trilogy by Ted Dekker, you'll know the names of the two characters in the title. Tanis, Firstborn of Elyon's children, hero of the Colored Forest, first to fall to wicked Teeleh's tantalizing fruit and water. Then there's Qurong, strong and mighty leader of the Horde, Desert Dweller, father of Chelise, and quite possibly Thomas of Hunter's greatest enemy (besides Teeleh, of course). Between these two men lies a conundrum: Tanis and Qurong appear to be the same person. Or, at some point in Qurong's life, he was Tanis. How does this work out? There are a few things in the story that indicate Tanis and Qurong are the same, yet other things that speak to the contrary. For one, Qurong's daughter Chelise MUST be older than sixteen, because sixteen years elapsed between Black and White. Assuming Chelise was born post-Fall rather than pre-Fall. Is there a way to reconcile these differences? I believe there is.

First, IS Tanis and Qurong the same? Well, at the end of Black, Tanis succumbs to Teeleh's tempting and partakes of his fruit and water. Immediately, Teeleh's dark army attacks Tanis, ripping him to pieces. There's no way he survived, given what Thomas saw. Yet, he exists as Qurong. Did he really die? Or perhaps he was revived as the wicked ruler of the Horde in order to further Teeleh's purposes. Here is my theory:

Tanis = Qurong

There's no mistaking the fact that Tanis became Qurong, and may yet become Tanis again. However, Tanis and Qurong are very different people. They are the same, yet not the same. This is in accordance with Paul's idea of the "new creation". When Adam fell at the very beginning in the Garden, he ceased to be the old, perfect Adam that he once was. He was now a fallen man, prone to sin, wicked in every way. He was still Adam, and yet at the same time he wasn't. This is how it is with Tanis/Qurong. When Tanis fell, he became Qurong, but they are not the same. If Qurong was to drown willfully in Justin's red lakes, he would become Tanis again, having died to the disease and made new in Justin. But until that happens, Tanis and Qurong will remain the same, yet different.

Focus: Life or Death?

Not too long ago, I posed a question to one of the online communities I frequent. What is more important, Yeshua's life or his death? Personally, I believe his life is most important, and I'll explain why in a bit. But I found that most people who believe Yeshua is the messiah believe that his death is more important. After all, what saved us, his life or his death? Now, for the explanation of my belief on the subject.

I believe, as I said, that Yeshua's life was more important than his death. Not too much more important, but still more important. Common rebuttals to this statement are that his death is what saved us, not his life. But how could he die if he had not first lived? At the same time, sure his death saved us from our sins and an eternity separated from the holy, righteous, unfathomable, and overwhelming love of our Creator should we repent of our sins and turn to Him, but we still sin, yes? Precisely my point. Even with that salvation, that forgiveness, we still sin. His death did not, will not, and cannot prevent that. But his life can. It is through his life that we learn HOW to live, HOW to love, and HOW to follow G-d. Yeshua teaches us through his LIFE how to LIVE. He teaches us what is sin and how to best avoid it...not that we will always succeed at perfection, but we WILL succeed at being what G-d wants us to be: His Children.