I stand and hold my five week old grandson in my arms. He lies, eyes wide open, searching my face, exploring the landscape of a new discovery. I watch him as he frowns with concentration and the effort of focusing. We hold our gazes. Suddenly, his mouth explodes into a wild, unruly smile. There is connection.
Arlo lives in Copenhagen, so I have not had the chance to hold him since then. Nevertheless, we have seen many times and have been able to watch him grow. The love his parents have for him is unfathomably deep. They are learning about him, and he is learning about them. They are teaching each other.
***
Learning is probably the most important activity in human society. Teaching is an integral part of the learning process. Learning and teaching are the processes that ensure our survival, and they do not rely on specialists. Instead, the reliance is on the relationship between the teacher and the child, upon the very essence that nurtures our lives which is love, care, affection. Our modern society does not recognise this, in fact it would state that our survival is dependent almost solely upon wealth, earning money to support ourselves, working hard to realise our material aspirations.
In the inaugural talk given at the Kanchipuram Nai Talim conference by Vinobe Bhave (Nai Talim is considered to mean ‘education for life’). He was a philosopher, teacher, advocate for non-violence and human rights, considered a National Teacher of India and successor to Gandhi. He stated that:
‘It is the egocentricity of the teacher that he thinks that he can teach. As long as we cherish this pride we’ll never be able to understand the essence of education.’
To me this statement elicits two questions: What is teaching? and What is education? These questions must be asked when considering the relationship between the teacher and the taught. When Vinobe Bhave uses the word egocentricity he is defining the separation that exists in the process of teaching that creates the gulf between the one who knows and the one who is ignorant, that sense of superiority that can easily merge into arrogance. When this occurs, learning is almost always reduced to the mechanical activity of instruction and memorising.
Here I would suggest that the essence of education is dialogue, the meeting of minds.
‘The relation in education is one of pure dialogue. I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes waiting for his mother to speak to him. But many children do not need to wait, for they do know that they are unceasingly addressed in a dialogue which never breaks off. In the face of the lonely night which threatens to invade they lie preserved and guarded, invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust.
Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists – that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one’s fellow men the great Love.’
This extract is from Between Man and Man by the philosopher Martin Buber published in 1948.
Before I continue, I want to point out that what we are exploring in the teacher-student relationship is not based on any sense of treating the student in some sentimental, romantic, or indulgent way. Instead, the reality is of awareness, understanding, and trust that acknowledges the existence of another, unique human being. In this relationship there is constant movement in limitless space because the focus is not on outcomes, not on conclusions.
This dialogue between beings unconstrained by time, not limited to words, and, therefore, free from fear is that of the meeting of friends. When there is trust there are no expectations and there is no manipulation, which gives rise to learning that spills over through boundaries of subject, content, and capacity.
I would like to finish this piece with a quotation from ‘Education in a Time Between Two Worlds’ by Zachary Stein and published in 2019 in the USA –
‘School systems as we have known them have exhausted themselves and are becoming a dysfunctional part of the social system. It has now reached the point where schools have started to have the opposite of their intended effect. Even by the reductive standards of the human capital theory, most school systems are failing insofar as they are not equipping upcoming generations with the skills and dispositions needed to maintain key functions in economic and governmental institutions.’
This sets the context in which we now live, and will lead on to the next piece of writing in which I will dig more deeply into the teacher-student relationship and just how significant it is in meeting the world crisis.
