Socrates has been credited with uttering the phrase, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” This is an expression I have discussed many times with my good friend and fellow educator Chad Miller. In our many conversations we come back to the understanding that in life, reflection is crucial to growth and evolution of one’s being. As the new school year is fully upon us, with me in a new role, I think it has a lot of implications in my personal and professional life.
I see many people who do not examine anything in their life. That is not a criticism as much as it is an observation. One could argue in order to examine your own life one needs to be reflective. Reflection can take many forms but one is that of a critical eye. One must be willing to consume information and reflect on its contents and not lose sight of the bias, intent, source, and reliability. For example, I recently engaged with a family member on a well-known social media site. I should know better but sometimes there is nothing on TV and you feel like engaging in a heated discussion online. 🙂 This individual was sharing content that was clearly biased and pushing an extreme political agenda that was completely false and inaccurate. While I am not going to engage in the politics of the content, the conversation was what mattered. I questioned the individual and engaged in a conversation about the source, intent, and validity of the content being shared. Admittedly, this individual eventually relented and claimed they just shared what they saw on their feed and assumed it to be true. Socrates would be rolling in his grave.
To connect this notion to the work we do in schools, I wonder how many of our educational lives are examined. I don’t mean examined by an administrator as we all know those are often more about completing documents than they are about teaching competence or true reflection. The truly examined life is one in constant reflection and struggling to find the path to improvement and self-evolution. I have always believed that if a teacher doesn’t see the need for growth in themselves, they are already a lost cause. Everyone has a space for growth and for the sake of their students, they need to improve. Everything we do in school should be examined, from the policies we enforce and the lessons we teach to the spaces we create and the people we hire.
Educators of high-quality are very reflective and teach the examined life. They are never content and always looking for ways to improve what they do and how they do it. Stagnation is the death of an examined life. Even more so, these teachers are the ones that instill this belief in their students. A reflective outlook on life is critical and maybe more so now than ever. We live in an age of information overload and content fire-hosing us all the time. It is imperative we are critical consumers and examine, reflect and analyze everything we come across. If we don’t, we fall into the trap of believing everything we see and everything we hear and assume it is the truth. Worse is by not living the examined life we will fail to evolve which inherently perpetuates the status quo and antiquated thinking that prohibits growth and self-improvement. It is in this way that stereotypes are reinforced, that belief systems continue in antiquated fashions, and people never evolve or change.
Live and teach the examined life as that is our only hope of growth and evolving past the culture of ignorance, stagnation, and mediocrity which we can so often find ourselves in.