The surprising personal benefit of becoming an educator

I’m speaking here of becoming a genuine educator – one who grants that the purpose of education should be about the learner, and for no other reason than that the learner is a worthwhile human being to be respected firstly for their own sake. This means that education must be about their unconditional value in themselves – about their first duty to live a worthwhile life as a matter of self-respect. Of course they must be put in charge of their lives and minds in order to do that. What they make of their lives, and the value that they put into them, must be up to them.

This would, inevitably, be a huge task. It would at least be the major preoccupation of all of that time that we currently consider compulsory schooling to be, but also extending on through the rest of life, because life is not limited to school, let alone compulsory schooling, and learning to live ends only with the end of life.

This would need to be our major educational preoccupation, not only because so much is involved in it, but because all of the things that we currently obsesses over as “educationally central” would flow from it. Things such as the “basics”, or jobs, or being productive. Or being responsible and law abiding citizens and tax-payers who play their part in democracy, and are not unnecessarily burdensome to others – by eating the wrong food, or failing to exercise, or to meditate.

Who and what they decide to become as people is the real “basic” upon which depend all of these things that are subsequent and derivative. It is only the value of the person that gives them their point. It gives the real point to learning to read, or calculate, or code, or be healthy. Without this, these other things quickly become aspects of paternalistic plans that some people have for others. They deteriorate into indoctrination.

Any of these derivative things would be resolved easily and enthusiastically as education unfolded, because learners would come to them for their own good reasons, inspired by their own passions and thoughtful purposes, rather than manipulated into them by us. They would only become problems if they were arranged unreasonably.

Arranged unreasonably, it might well take bribery, threat of punishment, coercion or manipulation, or the inculcation of fear and anxiety to get the young to comply – and to continue to comply throughout their lives. Then, such undertakings are likely to suggest long, slow processes that suppress curiosity and natural passion, discourage  critical thinking, creating a dependency on “authority” and popular fashion. Something, perhaps, like schooling.

We would, of course, have to struggle with high levels of disengagement in school, work and politics. We would need to resort extensively to additional mechanisms to deal with various inevitable attempts by those insufficiently processed who might seek to break out of our control. And we would need to contend with those who, in their surrender, turn their frustration inward in depression, substance abuse, or suicide.

We should want to become genuine educators, then, simply because respecting human beings for their intrinsic worth is the right thing to do. As the purpose of education, this occupies the ethical high ground – enabling their good, as determined by them, in the light of their best learning and ability. There is no higher, and anything less than this does the learner a profound injustice.

What is startling, however, is that standing up for this true educational purpose by working to realise it in institutions and activities, and supporting individual learners in the realisation of their own worth for themselves comes with a remarkable personal benefit. Every serious move in these directions brings with it an enhancement of our own powers to make the best of our own lives.

Becoming, and then being such an educator, is unavoidably an educational process for us too. Our immersion in the tasks of others to carve out the best lives for themselves inevitably challenges us with the dilemmas and intricacies of such a task, challenging and informing our choices; building and illuminating our own experiences, and identifying their limitations. As we support learners in moving forward, we cannot help but move forward ourselves, growing in understanding, in decision-making, and in personal power.

This remarkable benefit exists, because the educational task is not for the educator to discover what “good living” or “the good society” (that facilitates good living) are, because deciding each of these things must be up to the learner. It is to be their life, and their mind, not ours. Our task is to enable the best process that we can, and this means helping people to explore and expand on the issues of living well that people have encountered; exploring and expanding on the solutions that have been resorted to, or proposed, and encouraging learners to undertake these explorations in critical and disciplined ways.

In doing this, we just can’t help engaging in the inquiries ourselves. As we work in support of others, though we may keep our own conclusions private, we will inevitably reach them, and in our own way, just as others will be reaching for theirs. At the same time, we will still be receptive to experiences and ideas that challenge our own conclusions, because we must be open to these in others, just as we must be open to the possibilities that they happen to find and explore. We must be like this, not just to model the appropriate processes, but because we cannot keep helping others to advance if we fall into the trap of believing that we have the answers finally resolved for ourselves.

This is a huge gift to be given. In what other life-saving undertaking for the sake of others does there turn out to be an equal and reciprocal life-saving benefit for us; one that we need not even seek for ourselves, but that it is inevitable? In what other undertaking do we get to explore the nature of good living, having the necessity of the openness of inquiry shape our own pursuit of our own good? I don’t mean just the satisfaction of doing something truly worthwhile. I mean the gift that is given in knowledge and understanding of how we might best live our own lives, as we try to open up that gift for others.

Here, we become educators out of a desire to engage in an activity that is in the first place, respectful of human beings generally. We do so out of a desire to practice respect towards all, and we might expect satisfaction in that. Reciprocally, however, it also turns out to be the most effective and all-encompassing practice of self-respect. That reciprocal respect is exactly what it should be, just as is the reciprocity of educational experience among all educational participants.

I recall the repeated remarks of a senior Australian colleague from my first years as a university faculty member. He claimed that it was impossible to educate without being educated yourself. He was referring to the training of teachers, and the fact that, in their training, it clearly did not matter whether the trainees were educated people. Without even a consciousness of this, nothing could exist in the training process that could rectify such educational deficiency in them, either. 

Worse, so little attention was given to the idea of education itself that teachers were trained without any reason to care whether or not they were educated people. Of all of the tools supplied to them to make decisions in the classroom, educational principle could not be among them. He found this so frustrating that he lived almost permanently in a state of outrage. This exasperated many of his university colleagues, who could not understand his passion.

There are a number of reasons for this neglect in teacher-training.

The first of these is that, simply because so many decisions that might be educationally relevant are not for teachers to make, it hardly seems to matter whether they are capable of educational judgment or not. Many decisions are simply dictated by the regulation and administration of the school and schooling system itself. Many have to be made for learners in bulk, and cannot reflect the uniqueness of their lives and minds. Many are made remotely, setting the constraints of decisions downstream by assessment requirements, or curricula rules. Many are made by remote politicians who know nothing of education beyond what they learned at school themselves – which was nothing. Or by economists and other specialists whose knowledge of education extends no further than the study of school systems, and how they might be used.

The second feature of this neglectfulness is the treatment of the idea of education within such training programmes. If we are lucky, this treatment might amount to a single course, perhaps in “educational foundations”, or the history or the philosophy of education within a teacher-training programme. Some countries, such as New Zealand and the UK, have taken pains to ensure that not even one such course exists.

There is not much that can be done even in one course. There might, for instance, be a survey of the thoughts or ideas of a few “thinkers” – opinions of a few people who, for some reason got a hearing within history and whose opinions have survived. They are just “opinions” because, on the one hand, there is no real time to explore them in much detail, let alone the philosophical arguments behind them, and also because it is hard enough to do this while doing anything significant to develop the philosophical skill of the trainees who are to engage with them. The arguments are rarely worked down to the day-to-day detail of everyday life, let alone the classroom practice of today. Even if they were, if the ideas were genuinely educational at all, they would likely clash with classroom reality.

At this point, the sense that they are “mere opinion” is heightened, and dissolves the last vestige of value that they might appear to have, because the ideas are incompatible with what is transparently real.  In contrast to any idea of education, the assumptions that frame the whole fabric of conventional schooling-and-teaching have the status of “truth” – because they are there in the practice. They are binding, and they shape reality, even if they are educationally bankrupt. It is here, in this intellectual hypocrisy, that “theory” loses out to “practice”.

It is worth noting, too, that in these contexts of “educational foundations”, the chances of an educational theory being chosen for study are not all that high, because – in Western educational thought at least – educational theory is relatively rare. What there is in abundance, instead, is schooling theory. That is, there is an abundance of theory about trying to make the best of the management of learning under certain assumed schooling conditions. In terms of understanding human life and human nature in general, the value of such theory is inevitably very limited, given that it is restricted to life in school, but in teacher-training even this much is likely to collapse altogether when those schooling assumptions are at odds with the assumptions that frame the actual schooling systems we occupy today.

The third feature of this neglect flows very obviously from the first two, and all three reinforce each other. Teacher training is obsessed with the problems of practice. It has to be, because there are so many practical problems that constantly confound its own purposes – most of which arise from having to force people to do what they don’t want to do, or which they do reluctantly, or do for the wrong reasons.

These problems are firstly problems of “classroom management”; of behaviour, control, and discipline, but also of meeting the expectations of others who aren’t in the classroom but who are intent on assessing, in their own way, what is achieved in them, and to whom teachers are responsible. In my experience it is the first of these, though, that dominate the minds of young student-teachers. These problems manifest themselves, not only in the ineffectiveness of the learning, but also in career problems experienced by teachers, such as high rates of attrition and burnt-out.

At the same time, it is essential to keep the focus on the problems of schooling as “practical” and internal, and to give these such a high priority, because to examine the nature of education, and to use this to examine the purpose of schooling as disclosed by its history, would result in an intolerable contradiction. Belief in the value of schooling would be thrown into crisis, just as it is clearly feared that it would be if it was studied in school. If these things were examined by teacher-trainees in any detail, the significant attrition would begin within teacher-training itself.

The focus must be kept fixed firmly on the “practical”. The ‘theoretical” – about the nature of the institution and the purpose of it all – has to be kept vague and minimal. An exclusive preoccupation with internal, practical problems is vital to the maintenance the whole enterprise. This is what “educational research”, “evidence-based”, and “best practice” are all about.

When I took up my faculty post in education, I visited with some of my new teacher-training colleagues over morning tea in the first week. Without really appreciating who I was, one honoured me with an extended diatribe on the uselessness of philosophy and philosophers. He was angry, not just at the pointlessness of the field, but at the fact that it took time away from the practical matters that were so urgent, and so fundamental to the real lives of teachers.

The importance of not understanding education within our accepted institutions of “education” helps to explain the problem that so angered my Australian colleague – why it doesn’t really matter if teachers are educated, and why it may well be preferable that they are not.

There is a deeper level to this contradiction, however, and a much larger picture to be seen. Where my Australian colleague was outraged that people were supposedly attempting to educate without being educated, this always suggested that they needed to be educated first. It suggests that education is an accomplishment, that would-be teachers should be in an educated condition – perhaps as the result of the right kind of schooling, before they embark on teacher-training.

The genuine education that I have argued for, however, sees the end of education only with the end of life. It is what we are making of our lives that matters, and though we may consider some people more or less educated, this will be a comment on the degree of their educational grasp, and their on-going accomplishment, and not a description of some state that they have reached – of what has been “made of” them.

What matters, instead, is understanding the nature of education, and mastering one’s life through exercising educational judgment. The educated person is an educational person; managing life from an educational point of view. The issues of good living, and the educational management of them, are present in every experience, public and private. The management of our own learning, through employing educational principle, is how we steer our way forward.

This would suggest that the suppression of the idea of education in schooling, and in teacher training, is even more disastrous, because it robs them all – teachers and their students, of the educational self-mastery they need for the sake of their lives. This loss is evident, for instance, in the absence of educational passion in teachers themselves. It explains why, in addition to going to school to teach (because that is their vocation) teachers don’t go to school for the sake of their own education, or join there voluntarily with other adults to pursue their educational interests in common. This is not to be confused with their dedicated pursuit of professional development, or their complex discrimination among pedagogies, which is mere professionalism. A vital connection between their lives as professional “educators”, and the quality of their lives as human beings, is missing completely. They can’t even model the educational.

It also explains why “educational” institutions are populated almost entirely by people who are there under compulsion, or, when formal compulsion is ended, under that sense of compulsion to get a certificate they can cash in for a job. Schools just aren’t the sorts of places that people would go to, or spend time in, of their own free will just for the sake of “love of learning”. This absence of a genuine education – confused with a means reluctantly pursued for some other, extrinsic end, helps to explain, moreover, the anti-intellectualism in our societies. It helps to explain the larger part of our democratic failure. And it helps to explain why, once out of school, self-education is seen as so hard to undertake, and is pursued by so few.

But above all, it explains why so few people are active educators when all of us could be, and would likely want to be, whether professionally, or not. It explains why teachers are missing the half of the enterprise in which they are supposedly engaged. We could all be promoting a genuine education, insisting on it, collaborating to create it in every institution of our societies, and in every space, not because of some high-minded altruism, but because we are all in this together – the duty of each of us to live a good life – and in this we are dependent on each other’s experience and understanding, having so much to gain from working together. In this we stand to learn, even from little children, who can challenge the journey we are making with our lives even more than we may be willing to admit. We could be doing this because everything else that we might want for ourselves, as well as for others, depends upon it.

If it does seem strange that an active engagement with a genuine education in the service of the lives of others turns out to be an educational engagement with our own lives, then these structural conditions that are well set in place to prevent us from being able to entertain and engage with education in any serious way, will also help to explain that sense of novelty.