The spiritual roots of self-respect
Self-respect nourishes. There's a growing recognition that when schools and schoolbooks help children gain self-respect, progress happens—especially for children from minority groups. Helping minority children progress comes close to a crusade for Mildred D. Johnson, who has been in the field of education for more than three decades. Here she explores her approach, rooted in a growing understanding of man's spiritual nature.
How did you first get interested in education? They always called me "the little teacher." I remember when I was not more than eleven or twelve and was a very good reader, a neighbor wanted to read the Bible. I taught that man to read. I found out later that he wasn't well; oftentimes a physical challenge turns you to something deeper.
How did you get interested in developing educational materials? When I went to school, our books were almost always handed down—often from another school that was getting new books. I used to wonder about that. When I became a teacher, I saw other inequities, and I felt that these inequities would affect children. I also saw more of what the needs were.
There is a dearth of literature for black children. Children have asked me about their blackness, "Why do I look like this?" They see a standard symbol in front of them that says if you're not this, you're not very good. Even though there is some improvement in materials available, children have been indoctrinated with the prevailing view in the system.
Over a period of time I have become involved in an all-consuming project of developing materials to help children to become better at whatever it is they are doing. I carry little posters with me that say to children, "Do your best" or "Reach for excellence." Every poem I write talks about what you can do; my anthology is almost three hundred pages of "do your best."
During the time I was teaching in Chicago I had a children's theater group. I wrote plays, and the children presented them. I had that theater for at least ten years. I still do plays in the schools. I'll write a play for a school and use the children in that school to put it on.
For example, I did a play called Dilly. The point of the play was that Dilly was different, and other people didn't like her, but she learned to respect herself. In one school I chose a little Hispanic girl to be Dilly. It's hard to believe what being in that play did for her. There were a lot of black children in the class and just a few Hispanics. She had no idea that she could have been chosen to take a lead in a play. When it was all over, she went to her teachers and told them that she had been chosen. One teacher said, "What did you do to her?" The teachers couldn't get over it. I really didn't do anything to her. Except that I've been able to see that these are God's children. I'm seeing them as they really are.
When you say you're "seeing them as they really are," what do you mean? I'm making an effort to understand the spiritual concept of man. So when I look at children, I see qualities that are Godlike qualities as opposed to a material sense of man: hair, color, eyes, stature, that sort of thing. In Science and Health Mary Baker Eddy writes: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." That has been my credo for a long time. Otherwise I would consider myself black, disenfranchised, substandard, second-class, inferior, and I am none of those. I cannot truly be classified except as God's spiritual idea, as the expression of the one divine Mind. I want to see each individual as he or she really is. And that's what I work to do when I present my seminars and workshops.
How did you learn about Christian Science? I'm from a deeply religious family. When I was a little girl growing up, we went to Sunday School and church on a very regular basis. But as an adult, the church I was in really didn't satisfy me; I looked around for other things. I had been through a physical difficulty. The clerk at my school had told me to visit her brother and sister-in-law who lived near relatives of mine whom I was going to visit. I sensed something different there. I asked them questions, and the sister-in-law reluctantly gave me her only copy of Science and Health, the Christian Science textbook. I began to read it, and I couldn't put it down. Everybody wondered what in the world was going on with me.
Finally my sister said, "What are you reading?" I told her. I found out that, while she had not embraced Christian Science, she had read the textbook, and she told me that it had made her life. Christian Science turned my life around too. All of the physical difficulty I was having at that time evaporated. When I got back to Baltimore, I looked up a branch Church of Christ, Scientist. I was a member there for four years before I left and came to Chicago. During that period there were many healings. It was a whole turnaround for me.
What is your approach to prayer? I think my prayer has been more the living of spiritual truth and the uplift that results from that. No matter what comes up, my work is to put aside the false and see the perfect man. That's praying. There certainly are specific things that you pray about every day. But I try to get out of the material sense into the higher sense of whatever I'm dealing with. I have notebooks just filled with things that have come about simply because I was trying to live the truth and listen to God. My form of prayer is listening because I know God governs all and that He knows my needs and supplies them.
Are there success stories among students you've worked with? As a teacher, you don't know who you've touched. But you can rest assured that if you take the truth with you, you're going to touch somebody. I take the truth with me because I know that's where my answer lies. Although I'm not specific in talking about Christian Science, I do tell people, children in particular, how important they are, how good they look, how special they are. And children remember that.
I've done a series of books called "Somebody Special." There were students who came back, telling me where they were, what they were doing. I put written sketches about them in my books. One is an importer now. He graduated from the University of Chicago. Another one went to Bradley University and is an investor. One is a lawyer. There's a whole long list of success stories. How much I had to do with their success is, I'm sure, debatable. But I had one student who is a policeman now come back and tell me how much what I taught meant to him because his self-esteem had been bolstered.
I'm working on workshops with a new title, "The Year 2000." I was talking with parents about the year 2000. Some said they had not even thought about it. But they are going to be a part of a century turning over. I asked them, Isn't that something to be grateful for: that you can do the best you know how to do for the remainder of this century? And what will you do with the century that's coming?
What do you see for yourself in the future, to help children? If I am going to do anything further, it would be to continue to have children see that they are important, that life doesn't have to be burdensome, that they don't have to be classified as incompetent. But it is up to them. Each child should develop a sense of responsibility—or somebody should help them develop it.
Christian Science has been the anchor in my life. It has been the source of my progress, and I give God the glory for whatever I have been able to do. I believe that God, Spirit, is All, and if He is All, then that's all. And lack and limitation, discordant relationships, economic recessions, black and white—nothing can stop God from being God and working in our experience, if we are willing to listen.
I literally ask sometimes, "Now, God, what do I do?" If I'm clear enough and not all cluttered up with a lot of future predictions or eaten up with what I'm seeing on television, I will hear what He is telling me to do. I will do it. He will tell me what to do for the children that I'm with and how to help improve the quality of their life and their education. I think when we become unselfish and willing to serve, we don't become creatures of our circumstances, no matter what is going on around us.
