In Search Of Heroes Members Program

Michael Davis: Teachers. I can say that without even thinking. Teachers. Teachers. Teachers. The future of our country, the future of our planet, rests in teacher’s hands and in their ability to reach young minds. I think clergymen also. One of the tenets of Christianity is that you bring other people to Christ; you give them the opportunity to come into that.

A lot of times you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time trying to teach that lesson, because it gives them something to look up to. Being a rock star is very cool and glamorous, but being a teacher has real substance. I still remember my sixth grade teacher. She was phenomenal. I was a class clown, but she said, “You know, Michael, you do your work and I will give you five minutes just to be stupid.”

She didn’t try to pigeonhole me, and I used to couldn’t wait for that five minutes! I was able to cut up in class. I do a lot of lecturing and public speaking and I am a motivational speaker on some levels. I talk in front of just about everybody, and I know for a fact that my ability to do that now came from Mrs. Rabenow letting me have my five minutes. The hardest thing in the world when you are a kid is to get up in front of people, and I loved it! Yeah, I think teachers are it!

The only reason I have any use for private schools, because I think private schools are kind of elitist and it is not fair, but it is because they really nurture individuality. One of the problems with people of color, in my opinion, is that their parents are usually so busy trying to work that quality time spent with one person at home is difficult.

Reading and writing is one thing, but it is the little things that really help you get ahead. Personality, the importance of not being late, the importance of dressing well, et cetera, private schools really nurture that individuality. I almost taught at one, which would have changed me entirely as an artist if I had gone to teach at this school. It was making it really hard for me not to because it was such a great deal.

I just would have been a different person.

Wow, who does get the credit for the things that they do? Very few people do. The most obvious are teachers.
My oldest daughter is a teacher and she’s a very good teacher, but my middle daughter has had some problems with teachers who were burned out, and the reason they’re burned out is because they are not given what they need to teach the kids the way that they should be taught. They are not given a salary that’s commensurate to what they do.

They are true heroes, and yet they’re downtrodden to the point where they just give up. It’s a real shame. Almost every teacher to the person went into it for the love of children, because they wanted to help build a better society; because they wanted to build an enlightened society; they wanted to help the children have a better life than they did. That’s the reasoning behind being a teacher. There is no other reason because they don’t get paid enough to be anything else.

So what happens? Society comes along and they crap on their art programs. The art programs have just about been totally removed from school now. I have to pay extra for my kids to go after school to learn the arts, which I gladly do, but there’s no reason why it should be removed.

Physical education, which was a paramount part of school when I was there, is not like twice a week. Music programs are now all but gone. It’s insane because they’re penny pinching everything. The kids are not learning anything but the golden rule and the ABCs, that’s all they’re learning. School is not only no longer fun, but they’re not learning the things they need.

Without beauty in your life, without the arts in your life, without music in your life, what is life? How far can you go on ABC, one, two three? It’s a shame, and the teachers are feeling this in the core of their hearts.
After a while with the frustration, they get to a point of being burned out where they’re mistreating the kids to a point. They’re just mean. They hate life; they hate where they’re at; they hate what’s happened to them; they hate not being able to give the children what they went into this to do. It’s one of the biggest shames in our society that I have ever seen.

The children are our future and we are just stomping on them by not giving them what they need to be what we want our future to be; what we profess that we want our children to be.

There are so many people who are home schooling now, and I’m not sure that that’s the answer either because the kids don’t get the social interaction that they do at school, which is important, but what are you going to do?
As far as heroes are concerned who are downtrodden and not taken care of, there are God knows how many professions that fall into that category, but I honestly believe that the worst of all, the worst crime of all is what we as a society have done to the teachers of this country who have given their lives and souls and gone to school for all of those years to become what we’re denying them the ability to be.

There’s no greater crime, I think, in society than that today.

Character is the indelible mark that determines the only true value of all people and all their work.
- Orison Swett Marden