Fred Lighthall, who taught Educational Psychology at the University of Chicago when I was in the M.A.T. program there, shared this essay with us about what we hold sacred, and how our actions communicate our hierarchy of values.

Shared here with fondness and gratitude, but without permission. I believe Professor Lighthall would not object.

I have been consulting with an elementary school principal on various matters of concern to him. I have occasion to visit his school one morning as students and late-arriving teachers enter the building. As I wait in the corridor, kids streaming past me to their rooms, an adult enters and passes me whom I take for some reason to be a parent. She seems not to be in a hurry. As she passes me I detect the odor of alcohol. As she walks down the hall, she weaves. I conclude the she is under the influence of alcohol, and wander down to the classroom that she enters. From outside the classroom I can hear much shouting by the third graders, and as I come closer to the doorway I see two kids scuffling. Some on-lookers urge them to stop; others root for their favored scuffler; in the doorway now, I look for the teacher. The only adult in the room, the parent absorbed with her coat, is mumbling something to a child nearby. As I am about to move off to the principal’s office to let him know of this teacher-less classroom, the parents sits in the chair behind the teacher’s desk. She begins looking for something in the top drawer. One of the kids called out, “Mrs. Brown, Billy and Joe are really fighting!”

The manner and tone of this child’s complaint and the way in which the woman assumes her position behind the desk put me in breath-taking shock: This weaving, mumbling, alcohol-smelling woman IS their teacher! I stop in my tracks. The woman calls to the boys raucously, “Stop fighting, you kids!” They look at her briefly – with faces that do not reveal a student-teacher relation – and continue pushing, now less vigorously, but continuing their hostile verbal exchange. The kids in the rest of the room are in small groups or alone, attending to matters of their own choice. The teacher rummages among papers and books atop the desk in manner that reveals how deeply alcohol has taken over her senses.

I walk to the principal’s office and describe what I have just witnessed. He replies, “Oh yeah. I know it. She’s an alcoholic. There’s nothing I can do about it.” I am dumbfounded. “What?!” He relates how he went to his superintendent about this woman, asking for help in getting her fired. The superintendent’s reply was that he could well understand the principal’s feelings, but that the legal history of cases in which school districts tried to fire tenured teachers accused of alcoholism was one of failure: time and again school districts lost their cases and teachers incompetent from alcoholism were returned to their classrooms. I urged that this case had to be different, so visible were the effects. The principal and I set about planning how to develop legal cases. The outcome was partially successful, the teacher taking a medical leave of absence.

The point of the story is what it reveals about a sacred of schooling. First, we are shocked at the prospect of children’s education and supervision being handed over to a woman so drunk she cannot control movements, much less her classroom. For such to happen is an utter profanation of the sacred order of a school. Nowhere in any law or certifying agency is it written that teachers should not be drunk when teaching. It is not written because it is assumed as necessary starting point of care giving and teaching that the professionals responsible are in possession of their faculties. It is not that the teacher has done teaching badly. It is that a condition of teaching has arisen that is unthinkable. For a teacher to come to school drunk is simply shocking. But our shock is compounded: We find that administrators responsible for assuring minimal levels of competence in teaching and safety for children in their trust are helpless to respond to this profanation, creating a second profanation: The unthinkable conditions is knowingly being allowed to continue. If they can allow this condition to continue, what other assumed necessities for school can also be violated?

A second aspect of the school district’s sacred is here revealed in the superintendent’s own local sacred, namely, his honoring of budget over fundamental principle. No matter how just it might be to take this lady to court in an effort to terminate her tenure, in the face of so many losing that legal battle, the superintendent would not even attempt to wade in more strongly. Why? The bottom line was financial: legal battles were costly. Integrity of the economic base was given privilege over integrity of the school’s moral base. One can argue in support of the superintendent. One can consider him a “realist.” One thing is clear, however. His own sacred was tied to the financial realm of life more than to the experiential lives of children or to the moral underpinnings of education as a profession or institution.

Much more can be said about this short-sightedness about the school district’s financial liability from children being injured under the mis-supervision of an alcoholic teacher, and the rest. The point here is that the sacred of an institution or of a particular organization is hidden deep in the recesses of the social order universally assumed, implicitly necessary for that institution or organization to perform its functions. That sacred comes to light when it becomes profaned by an act or condition incompatible with the assumptive order. The psychological reaction to a violation of that assumptive order is shock: the rug one is standing on has suddenly been pulled out from under. One’s relationship to reality becomes shattered; one is left speechless, incredulous, and momentarily helpless. One repairs to some other aspect of one’s sacred to confront such a profanation. If it is financial realism, so be it: that reveals one’s sacred. If it is effective concern for children’s safety then perhaps one mobilizes one’s resources to place an additional adult in the alcoholic’s classroom. In either case, one’s sacred becomes revealed.

Jean Paul Sartre saw only one choice not available to humans, the choice not to choose. Similarly, with action and policy and plans: one can have virtually any sacred imaginable, but one cannot long avoid holding to some sacred. It guides all the rest. Knowing it, we have knowledge of the central, the fundamental, and the controlling genesis.