I am retiring from teaching English, computer science, and business technology in Philadelphia schools after 25 years, and have considered bringing my career to a close. My fastidiousness to articulate, establish, enforce, and exemplify the moral tone in the classroom is still here. So is the gratification of watching my students use technology responsibly to hone and exhibit the writing and speaking skills I taught them, in order to win competitions of various sorts. Gone, however, is the feeling of self-worth where I could leave each day with a discernible feeling of accomplishment. Regrettably, the moral tone of the schools is no longer struck with the alacrity and fastidiousness it once had, so the students are no longer the active, discerning, and productive consumers of their own education, in appalling opposition to human reason. It is most regrettable.
When I began teaching in the district in 2002, I knew that my students were ill-prepared for the workplace. Their reading and writing abilities were below grade level, a concern I addressed to my department chair. He impressed upon me the importance of establishing meaningful relationships to meet the students academically where they are. I chose instead to seize upon as many new writing initiatives in the literature I could get my hands on to help my students build confidence in their writing and in myself teaching it. Through trial and error, some students improved, and a few reflected the importance of planning as part of the writing process instead of feebly trying to shortchange it to save time and effort. A select few showed promise by writing their college application essays almost independently, and those who did went on to college or trade schools.
Then came the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the civil unrest that followed by unhinged leftist kooks. With veritable impunity, they caused hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage. In my immediate neighborhood, I witnessed some of it myself in Philadelphia on May 30. Police cruisers were set aflame, and ground-level windows of businesses along Chestnut Street were shattered with reckless abandon. Local law enforcement did not constructively intervene. The city seemed vaguely reminiscent of Kristallnacht, and I took videos and pictures to document some of it. In most every progressive jurisdiction, district attorneys refused to prosecute violent crime in the aftermath. In April 2021, The Guardian reported that district attorney Larry Krasner deferred 95% of offenders to restorative justice programs. It seems reasonable that he stridently permitted the burning of our city, and from anecdotal accounts, many of my students became unduly sympathetic to it. Many have learned vicariously to hate America, and even after graduation, subordinate everyone else to the rule of law but themselves.
Hence, the propagation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) from the classroom to the workplace. It has not led to success in the professions as many on the left emphatically stated it would. Peter Cappelli, HR Executive’s Talent Management columnist and a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources cites two important theories in a February 2025 article. First, the novelty has long since worn thin. Working remotely and undue pressure to trim the workforce, the cumbrous accoutrements of COVID, have caused many corporate executives to reconsider their return on investment. The second entails an evidentiary shift of public opinion. "Harvard University Professor Frank Dobbin’s important and under-appreciated work on diversity showed a decade ago that diversity training programs were backfiring by trying to make white men, in particular, recognize their biases. They resented it, and that led to declines in actual diversity. The view that DEI programs had the goal of changing how people think, and not just changing employer practices, was widespread and unpopular." (Peter Cappelli, "The collapse of DEI: What went wrong?" February 14, 2025) While the novelty may have been met with glowing approbation at least in theory, actual practice was another matter entirely.
Rachel Minkin's survey published in a Pew Research Center article corroborates. She surveyed 6,204 working adults in October 2024 as to their opinions about the efficacy of D.E.I. and found that 56% were positive, down from 60% in February 2023. Negative perception rose from 16% to 21% during the same period. The results suggest that D.E.I. seems to have only minimally helped the people for whom it was intended. Substantial returns on investment have not materialized. Hence, the importance of traditional Judeo-Christian values of hard work, common sense, and the making and keeping of promises.
It takes more than the pusillanimous behavior and siren songs of morally relativistic D.E.I. initiatives to make human life work, simple, messy at times, and altogether imperfect though it may be. It consists not of vacuous race-based programming, where its object is measured ephemerally only in terms of profit and privilege. Least of all, it is a strident encomium of obstreperous and confiscatory left-wing agendas glorified as societal goods. Our heritage demands the far more urgent renewal of American dignity, a living hope directed by discipline, virtue, and above all, order. It requires character and the manifestation of moral truth to set the example by seeking and doing what is true and good.
Comporting with sound doctrine, Benedict 16 taught by way of the cross both theologically and morally with a strong vertical component aligned with the moral law and a horizontal one aligned with the world, the one at all times square and symmetrically balanced with the other. Pope John Paul 2 most perspicaciously teaches: "It is never acceptable to confuse a 'subjective' error about the moral good with the 'objective' truth rationally proposed to man in virtue of his end, or to make the moral value of an act performed by following the judgment of an erroneous conscience" (John Paul 2 Veritatis Splendor 63). Moral conscience is always fundamental.
Freedom ungrounded in the clear objective truth of the moral law only forebodes idolatrous relativization. It implies evil acts do not exist which stands in stark contrast to Scripture: "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but having itching ears, they shall heap to themselves teachers in accordance with their own lusts" (2 Timothy 4:3) Respect for the primacy of law putatively fades where in turn, respect for God and the inalienability of every human life no longer have any juridical value. They reductively become objects which can be insidiously negotiated or even anarchically disposed of.
My department chair's admonition long ago for teachers to know themselves is at last clear now. So that they may succeed, we must teach our students to thrive within the limits bound and circumscribed by the moral law. Only then can they realize their responsibility before it, and aspire to the cultural, moral, and intellectual grandeur to which they are eminently capable, true to their American heritage. This is the true business by which teachers aspire to the luminous greatness to which we are called, and sanctify the world.
