Sadness; Producing Units Not Souls

I feel such a deep sadness right now. It is 1:18 AM, I am listening to Andrew Bird with a dim light from the hallway illuminating my back, and all I can think is how horrifying it is that our country produces units and not souls.

Through secondary school, we teach our students the fundamentals of math, science, and English composition. Most notably, our culture celebrates success as the result of earning money and buying things. This is why students always ask teachers, "When am I ever going to use this in real life?" Everything is filtered through the lens of the accumulation of wealth and things: this is the lens our students use.

We never teach them how to approach grief, how to love without possession, how to value the one life they have, how to value the one life their partner has, how to navigate rage and devastation and abandonment, how to remain steadfast in the face of immense suffering and atrocity, how to reconcile life and death, how to form their own axioms, how to live a life they want, how to develop their own lens, how to deeply suffer but remain standing from pure love.

Yet we teach them the path to a good and developed life is the salary they earn, the cars they own, the size of the homes they buy, how they rank in relation to their fellow humans.

We taught our students how to make a living but not how to make a life.