Author: Jay Leonard Schwartz

Writer, Creative, TESOL Teacher/Teacher-Trainer, Education Consultant, Academic Materials-Developer, Musician, Filmmaker. Independent Author

Humanism Without Distance: What MLK Still Asks of Teachers

January 17, 2026January 17, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Every year we quote Martin Luther King Jr.
Every year we praise his moral clarity, his courage, his vision of justice and dignity.

At the same time, teachers are told to “be humanistic,” “be learner-centered,” and “support the whole learner” while working under conditions that quietly make dignity harder, not easier, to sustain.

That contradiction is not accidental—and King would have recognized it immediately.

King’s work did not emerge from abstract moral concern. It emerged from material realities faced by African Americans: segregated schools, suppressed wages, restricted housing, blocked civic participation. When he spoke of justice, he spoke about conditions—who carried risk, who absorbed instability, and who was expected to wait patiently while inequality remained intact.

He was clear on one point: moral language without material change is not progress. It is delay.

For teachers, that insight lands close to home.

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Open Communication, Empathy, and Difficult Conversations

January 7, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

In many classrooms, teachers avoid topics like climate change because they fear conflict or discomfort. Yet avoiding difficult topics does not teach students how to communicate about them—it simply postpones the problem.

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Grades, Judgment, and the Machinery of Worth

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Grades, Judgment, and the Machinery of Worth

Nobody ever tells students the most dangerous thing about grades:
they don’t just measure performance—they train you to outsource your sense of worth.
They feel neutral and necessary. That’s exactly why they’re dangerous.

Grading is a necessary evil in education. Necessary, because institutions require some way to sort, credential, and move people through systems at scale. Evil—not in a melodramatic sense, but in a quiet, corrosive one—because grades are so easily mistaken for something they are not.

A grade is information. It is a signal within a bounded system. It is not a measure of human worth, potential, or legitimacy. Most students are never explicitly told this, which is why the signal so easily becomes a verdict. Unless that caveat is made explicit, students absorb something far more dangerous than the grade itself: the idea that judgment arrives from elsewhere, and that its verdict is final.

This is where the real injustice begins. Not because the system is intentionally cruel, but because it is largely silent about what its judgments are meant to mean—and what they are not.

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Of Resolutions, Humbug, and Community—A Reflective Riff on Scrooge

December 18, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Long before resolutions became annual rituals, Charles Dickens, the nineteenth-century English novelist and social critic, offered a rather effective alternative. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge does not sit down and draft a list of behavioural targets or learning outcomes. He is shown his life—where it came from, how it currently unfolds, and where it is heading if nothing changes.

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Protecting or Infantilizing? Rethinking Blanket Bans, Digital Literacy, and the Role of Education

December 8, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

“The pattern is familiar: we fear the tool instead of investing in the skills that would make its use healthy and meaningful. Moreover, when we focus solely on removing access, we risk suppressing expression rather than equipping children to navigate a digital world they will inevitably inherit. “

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Teaching in the Age of Angst: Erich Fromm, Self-Actualization, and the Teacher-Self in TESOL

December 3, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Fromm believed the great paradox of modern life was this: people crave freedom, yet fear the responsibility that freedom demands. In response, they retreat—into systems, hierarchies, labels, and roles that offer security at the cost of authenticity. TESOL teachers know this tension intimately.

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Creativity Is Not a Strategy—It’s a Birthright: Reclaiming the Human Side of Teaching in a Testing Culture

December 1, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

In humanistic teaching, creativity is foundational because language itself is creative. Every sentence a learner forms is an act of risk-taking and self-expression. When instruction becomes reduced to test preparation, we mute the very capacities we claim to nurture: voice, imagination, identity.

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Taking Responsibility—Because Education Isn’t Just What You Teach, It’s How You Live

November 4, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Yes, in many places, climate change has already moved into the neighborhood. And as teachers, as materials developers, it means something to stand in front of a classroom built on land that is slowly, visibly, and measurably disappearing. To treat climate awareness as just another thematic unit between “Shopping” and “Sports” is not only poor pedagogy—it is a dereliction of responsibility.

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The Parallels Between Dewey’s Educational Philosophy and Dadaism: A Reflection on Self-Actualization in TESOL

October 13, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

A reflection on how John Dewey’s experiential learning philosophy and the Dada movement’s creative rebellion inform humanistic, self-actualizing approaches to TESOL and Dogme ELT.

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When People Show You Who They Are: Lessons in Leadership, Crisis, and Self-Actualization

October 10, 2025January 4, 2026 Jay Leonard Schwartz

Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Those words, simple and graceful as they sound, have extraordinary weight in professional life—especially in education, where trust, empathy, and perception form the unseen scaffolding of every classroom and workplace.

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