Teaching Excellence Amidst Moral Decline

Charlie Kirk once remarked: "One of the greatest threats to America is the fact that our school system is not teaching the next generation morals, American exceptionalism, free enterprise, the Constitution, the dangers of socialism or the value of hard work," all edifying fundamentals which guided my teaching and his outreach. Before his life was so perniciously ended, he established meaningful relationships with even his most implacable critics. His opinions were brilliantly incisive, and where he disagreed, he did so civilly, without condescension and with tolerance which few could rival. I wish I had like-minded people in my classes.

They can be trusted to exercise freedom responsibly, whereas those who relativize lawlessness, most especially on social media, cannot. With reckless abandon and veritable impunity, such people denigrate the inalienability of human life as a reductive commodity to be insidiously negotiated and even anarchically disposed of. So, after 25 years teaching English, computer science, and business technology in Philadelphia schools, I have retired. I ended my tenure much as I began, with a question of exegesis, teaching excellence amidst unparalleled moral decline.

Disputatious bureaucrats, in redress of past grievances, have tendentiously set upon public school teachers the Marxist secularities of equity and identity politics, which have censoriously undermined moments of student accomplishment and preposterously trivialized them. While sadly many are no longer the active, discerning, and constructive consumers of their own education because of this, some of my students did produce artifacts refreshingly positive and worth relating.

My best business technology student in the fall of 2023 aspired to open a graphic design business in early 2026, and thought earning certifications in Microsoft Word and Excel in her senior year would prove helpful for producing promotional materials. My industry development specialist purchased a subscription to TestOut, an interactive online instructional platform, which the student used to full advantage. She spent over 200 hours learning both applications. She viewed approximately 12 hours of instructional videos, prodigiously worked and re-worked more than 400 practice exercises, and completed 12 live projects. By the end of that term, she earned not only the two foundational certifications she intended, but all of the constituent certifications required to earn the title Microsoft Office Specialist Expert. It remains a record-setting accomplishment in both the district and the Pennsylvania commonwealth.

After graduating, she worked as a technology associate at Launchpad, a non-profit that prepares high school students for careers in technology. While leveraging her text processing skills with HTML and CSS, she learned the Next.js, TailwindCSS, and TypeScript technologies to build a complex analysis tool she would later use as an intern at another non-profit, Self, Inc. to optimize its social media presence. Technology is only one competency in which my student excelled. Another proved proficient in literacy.

In 2008, my tenth-grade English students read about uplifting self-sacrifice in "The Man in the Water" by Roger Rosenblatt. It recounts the crash of Air Florida flight #90 on January 13, 1982, in Washington, D.C. Only 5 of the 79 people aboard survived and did so by precariously holding on to the tail section in the freezing Potomac River. Their names are not known, but one survivor's altruism was. He selflessly subordinated his own rescue to those of the others, which tragically resulted in his drowning.

In the class discussion that followed, students recounted incidents where they eagerly stepped up to help strangers in various tough situations. I learned privately that one aided a car accident victim at personal risk. Later in his senior year, he fully wrote about the experience as part of his college application. Though I am uncertain where he went, I felt gratified that my teaching coincided with his moral development. Those who imperil their lives in service to others exhibit rare courage and are exceptionally heroic, a lesson which a student taught me in a financial sense 16 years later.

The spring of 2024 afforded me the opportunity to teach an ad hoc expository writing seminar where my best business student and I worked closely on revision strategy. I placed particular emphasis on including specific details and building fluidity through smooth transitions, two skills that served him exceedingly well. After we finished, he entered the 90th annual essay contest sponsored by the Pennsylvania American Legion. Completely independently, he drafted a 500-word essay whose thesis was that the American dream, while still relevant, is frustratingly fragile, financially risky, and strategically harder to achieve than ever. Those who do are also heroic. He earned first place in the district and won a sizable cash prize. Later in the fall, he placed third in a districtwide business competition at Temple University sponsored by DECA, a non-profit organization that prepares high school students for careers in business. He and another student also earned second place at a national competition sponsored by Junior Achievement at the University of Georgia in June 2025, where students simulated running their own cell phone manufacturing company.

These achievements are illustrative of tremendous academic accomplishment, which I fervently wished all of my students enjoyed were it not for the overreliance and irresponsible use of technology. Of the hundreds of calls on the matter I routinely made to parents over the years, almost none have availed. If the true test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves, then I confess myself to have abjectly failed. Were students reading not from devices but heroic stories from books, and trying earnestly to live them, they could become exceptional and less vulnerable to demagogues.

They indoctrinate students to objectify race, sex, and class as pretexts for grievance and for their self-aggrandizement. These exigencies sell them short and are potentially dangerous. Exceptionalism requires the responsible use of freedom, concomitantly tempered and measured with inerrant moral truth. Responsibility is not an obstacle to exceptionalism, but the very means to it. As George Weigel wrote in To Sanctify the World: "...freedom was not a sectarian matter; it was about respect for our common humanity... Pope [John Paul 2] proposed that the universality of that aspiration confirmed the reality of a universal human nature and a universal moral law. The world needed dialogue, but that dialogue had to be structured: and the 'universal moral law written on the human heart' was 'precisely [the] kind of grammar' the world needed if it was to engage in a serious discussion about the human future (263)."

For education to have lasting impact, parents must realize they are their children's first teachers upon whose moral development depends. They must be role models, but sadly, many are not. Even if parents fail, teachers must, with full administrative support, set the example by articulating, establishing, enforcing, and exemplifying the moral tone of the classroom at all times, neither through slavish servility nor through inimically solipsistic and confiscatory equity agendas. American exceptionalism requires compassion but also merit. Most of all, it demands the unapologetic adherence to the moral law. Only through it can we inspire our students to the moral, cultural, and intellectual grandeur to which they are eminently capable. This is the true business by which teachers aspire undaunted to the luminous greatness to which we are called, and sanctify the world to our very end.