The county in which I teach just released its tentative plan for reopening schools in August 2020. Scanning it, I saw my previous daily routine of leading children through learning, singing, and creating replaced with a new routine—one of taking the temperatures, sanitizing the hands, monitoring the desk partitions, and adjusting the face masks of twenty squirming second-graders. And, unsurprisingly, I was discouraged. In this new environment, what happens to my high ideal of educating to form souls and shape intellects? How are teachers—and fathers and mothers and pastors—supposed to care for the soul when care for the body usurps every minute, when the pursuit of spiritual wholeness is taken up by the pursuit of physical health? What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?
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