Coolidge on Education and Careers

After a couple of weeks off as schools came back into session, let us see what the 30th President had to say about education and the noble profession of teachers in speeches and quotations given 100 years ago.

In an address as Vice President in 1922, Coolidge praised the profession, saying….

“It would be exceedingly difficult to overestimate the important part that teachers take in the development of the nation. They exercise their art, not on the materials of this world which pass away, but upon the human soul…”

In several speeches during the boom times of the Roaring ’20s, he warned of people’s tendency to idolize those who had built material wealth at the expense of reverence for the teachers who had chosen careers in education.

In today’s society, do we idolize the billionaires while expecting teachers to work for barely sustainable wages? Apparently, even 100 years ago that was a concern.

In a speech at Harvard’s graduation, he asked.. “Have we lost our reverence for the profession of teaching and bestowed it upon the profession of acquiring?”

Coolidge had opinions on the role of educators, saying.. “Education is to teach men not what to think but how to think.”

It seems both sides of our current political spectrum accuse the other of not following that belief. Could getting back to teaching how to think help us find common ground?

After his presidency, he criticized the notion that every person should go to college by writing in a Newspaper column.

“If we would stop thinking that a bachelor of arts or science must be a white collar man and let him be any kind of man he is adapted to be, the danger of spoiling a good craftsman to make a poor professional man would vanish”.

Lastly, in a 1919 graduation address at his alma mater, Amherst College, he addressed the use of knowledge.

“Civilization depends not only upon the knowledge of the people, but upon the use they make of it. If knowledge is wrongfully used, civilization commits suicide”

One wonders whether that last quotation is a warning relevant to today’s issues being debated regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

We all owe a debt of gratitude to our teachers; let’s give them all the support we can.