World Teachers’ Day
Today, October 5th, is World Teachers Day is coming up on October. This year’s theme is “Stand Up for Teachers.” Most people have never heard of it. For me, it’s World Teachers Day 365 days a year. If we don’t up for those who hold society on top of their shoulders, a catastrophe is certain.
In 2000, I founded Teachers Without Borders (TWB), a global non-profit designed to connect teaching and international development because teachers are the true catalysts of change, the acupuncture points of our society, and the glue that holds the world together. Today, with a small staff and an army of volunteers, the organization has been adopted by members in 184 countries.
At 59 million, teachers represent the largest professionally-trained group in the world. They know who is sick or missing or orphaned by AIDS. They have their ear to the ground. They’re the ones most qualified to take a community’s pulse. Unfortunately, the voices of teachers are rarely heard. More often than not, they are demonized as the problem, not the solution.
I focus on telling the stories of teachers who have made an extraordinary difference in their own communities — in national and natural disasters, in settings wholly devoid of resources or support, and against almost insurmountable odds. The world may be a cesspool, but it’s filled with generous people. Teachers are at the top of that list.
As a high-school principal in the 80s and 90s, I sought a global perspective on issues of education, childhood, the future. To get the conversation going, I asked a simple question of teachers around the world. “What do you see outside your window?” What I learned changed me.
On one particularly pivotal day, a teacher from Nicaragua and another from Norway described what they saw outside their windows. After having suffered through weeks of unbearable heat, one teacher wanted to see and feel snow for the first time. The other, feeling trapped by dark northern days ahead, longed to bask in the sun. I simply connected them. What followed was a set of interactions that propelled me to quit my comfortable job as a principal and found Teachers Without Borders.
My organization supports teachers who don’t have time — but who somehow make time — for change. Teachers who don’t have much pocket change, but who change their communities anyway. Teachers who don’t have resources, but fashion them out of local materials and who rely upon their colleagues. Teachers without publicity firms, yet with a capacity to transform their communities — regardless of who is looking. These are teachers who don’t wait for an acts of Congress; rather, they work from acts of conscience. The world may be a cesspool, but it’s filled with generous people. And teachers are at the top of that list.
It’s easy to catalog horror stories about pseudo-humanitarian con artists, corrupt organizations, or roads to hell paved with good intention. Teachers see this on a daily basis, but they simply don’t have the time for cynicism. It’s also easy to promote a particular magic-bullet, killer-app, or one-size-fits-all solution to intractable global issues. But any teacher can tell you that the context for learning is far more complex than that. We can inform and energize the education debate by championing those teachers who face derision, betrayal, and attack, yet who continue to teach anyway, and who make monumental compromises, yet who will never settle for being compromised.
Brains are evenly distributed around the world, but education is not. Policies are instrumental for ensuring the rule of law, but they are not sufficient. Generosity and reciprocity are abundant, but wholly underutilized. On World Teachers Day, let’s look outside our own windows and stand up for teachers — without the constraints of borders. It is, in the end, our only hope to avoid catastrophe.
