To the editor:

In the Newton teachers’ strike, most parents, and certainly the kids, supported the teachers.  Some parents, however, opposed the teachers, and took legal action to compel their return. In doing so, they employed words and put forth reasoned arguments, the knowledge and development of which they owe to teachers.

Tradition used to distinguish three professions: law, medicine, and teaching. Lawyers and doctors were prohibited from advertising because it was seen as beneath the dignity of the profession. Today, with the legal industry and the medical business it is a question of how effectively a staff of attorneys can chase a large convoy of ambulances. At the same time, doctors are no longer the household gods they once were. This is not entirely their fault; they have been so devoured by corporate conglomerates that executives, who do not know what the doctor is talking about, can nevertheless decide what he can and cannot do.

Teachers then are the last genuine professionals deserving of the designation. They assume the daunting and critically important task of lighting the spark of learning in the young; stimulating and guiding inquiry in the rigorous search for truth; developing critical thinking, intelligence, and character simultaneously; opening the child’s mind and heart to the benign and humanizing influences of art, music, and beauty; preparing those who will be rational beings for citizenship and community; suggesting that perhaps Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner, and Shakespeare may well be as important as the latest CEO billionaire being stuffed down the kids’ throats; and doing all this at bargain prices!

If you ask 10 Jeopardy winners or 10 Nobel Prize winners about their formative influences, you will eventually get the name of some teacher.  Who among us does not have his or her own fondly remembered example?

They are the most important people in a child’s life, other than parents. It’s called in loco parentis. I know what it means because I once had a Latin teacher; you see, that’s the point! Besides, who knows enough trigonometry and calculus to get your kid into an engineering school, a stockbroker?

They are indispensable. If, then, a society cannot do without them, they should never be obliged to do without!

Joseph R. Noone

Lynn