"Faith, Hope, Love: The Spirit of Education"

You were living faith, hope, and love to me,” a student recently told Louis Schmier, now retired history professor from Valdosta State University in South Georgia after 46 years of classroom teaching. “I want to be for others what you were to me: walking faith, hope, and love.” Faith, hope, and love are what Schmier calls his “three little big words.” In this unique anthology of his selected essays on teaching that span the period from 1993 to the present, relying on both the latest research in learning and his classroom experience, Schmier recounts how he transformed from a noted researching and publishing scholar to a loving classroom servant teacher. He details how for the last 25 years of his collegiate teaching career these “three little big words” became the foundation of his credo: to be the person who is there unconditionally to help each student help her/himself become the person she or he is capable of becoming. Schmier tells how these three words infiltrated his spirit of teaching and living. In a unique manner, Schmier describes how they had a profound transforming impact on his self-perception, his perception of others, his sense of the value of teaching, his understanding of his craft’s mission, the formation of his vision, his somewhat unorthodox ways of teaching, and, most important, the positive impact it all had on the students. Schmier says that he acquired an unconditional faith in the unique potential of each student. “These ‘three little big words’ helped me,” he explains, “evolve into a ‘Student Whisperer.' They were sledgehammers that I swung to shatter the dehumanizing scaffolding of classification, labeling, ranking, disconnecting, tagging, pigeonholing, separating, dividing, stereotyping, and generalizing. I came to treat each class as a “gathering of sacred ones,” of diverse, individual, noble, and very special human beings. Consequently, I unconditionally believed in each student, treated each one with equal dignity and unqualified respect, and I found ways not to let anyone go unnoticed and not allow anyone’s face to get erased. Before each student, I see an angel proclaiming, ”Make way for someone created in the image of God." Schmier demonstrates that without unconditional faith and hope and love, education is as viable as a person with a brain but without a heart; and at the heart of education is the education of the heart. Faith, hope, love, Schmier concludes, get to the soul of education. They help a student to learn both how to make a good living and live the good life by assisting each of them discover his or her uniqueness and unique potential, and believe that each has the ability to reach for it. It is the validation of the human agenda in education that has the power to make a transforming difference in someone’s life. “It’s exercising,” explains Schmier, “what I call BI (Beauty Intelligence), LI (Loving Intelligence), and LKI (LovingKindness Intelligence). Those intelligences are crucial in education because teaching is a love story. It is a story demonstrated in unconditional caring, kindness, empathy, sympathy, support, and encouragement. A teacher imbued with that spirit is one of those serving people who realizes that everyone is a vital thread in the fabric of the future; everyone has a unique potential; everyone has dreams; everyone hopes; everyone has grace; everyone has a too often a hidden, ignored, and forgotten sacredness and nobility; everyone is beloved. Such a teacher is an unconditional believer, a befriender, a listener, a healer, a companion, an uncoverer, a gift giver, a helper, a transformer, a supporter, an encourager, an empathic, a nurturer, and a lover.” And so, as Schmier asserts, in the first line of his TEACHER’S OATH, “I will give a damn about each person in the class! I will care! I will support! I will encourage! I won’t just mouth it. I will live it! Each day, unconditionally!” And, that is what this anthology proclaims.