Matthew Dale Jones

Welcome to Teacher Saves World! on Substack, a new home for an old project my wife Laurie and I started as a podcast in 2020 and concluded in 2022. It’s hard to teach and do other things. Teaching is exhausting. We just ran out of steam. It’s not so much the creating; it’s the hustle of our current, creator culture. And having to spend so much time on a screen. It’s not for me.

So why a revival? Mostly because I can’t not create. Mostly because I can’t stop writing. Mostly because I can’t stop reading, and thinking, and observing, and applying, and experimenting, and revising, and failing, and learning.

And maybe it will mean something to somebody, some day, and if I don’t leave my scribbles where they can be found, they won’t.

Substack seems as a good a place as any to leave my trail of bread crumbs. Please forgive me if I don’t engage in the hustle that will most likely engulf this space before too long.

My obsession is school and human becoming. I’m not interested in education. I am not interested in the world as it is. I am interested in what humans can be, what the world can be, and how school can play a role.

School already plays a significant role in the world that is, its good and its bad.

How do we get to all good? How do we bend towards Eden?

I believe it’s possible. Not in any of our lifetimes, but I believe it’s the whole point of this grand, human experiment, the goal of our great arc of existence.

We humans have a habit of believing that evolution stops with us, here and now, and we claim to know how the world works, as if it were a static, unchanging thing despite the evidence of history to the contrary. All thought and behavior has reached its apex. When we do think of evolution, we only think in terms of technology and how it will evolve, and how it will change us. Even our science-fiction can only imagine a technologically advanced future peopled with humans that act like you and I do today with all our fragile needs for power and status. Even vampires, who apparently live for hundreds of years, are still susceptible to jealousy and rage and revenge. Can we not imagine an evolved, better humanity?

What would it take to bend towards a human world free of all that ails us? That’s the question that drives me, and it’s the question that drives this Substack.

Because I have been a high school teacher for over twenty-five years, and because I am married to one with only a few less years in the classroom, my thoughts on the topic naturally live in and around how school plays a part in all this, in what is happening now and where we can go.

If that sounds remotely of interest to you, subscribe. For as along as I am teaching, and receiving a paycheck, I will not ask for your financial support. Everything I post will be free. This is not a side-hustle for me, and if I start treating it like one, I know I’ll get frustrated and burnt out. I’m just leaving bread crumbs. Nibble if you like, or leave them be and maybe someone, some day, will find them nourishing.