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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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January 12, 2007
Toward the Basics of a Humane Being by Eugene E. Narrett, Ph.D.
A discussion of teaching strategies in the Chronicle of Higher Education invited us to consider the interplay of teaching and learning.1 This properly is not an abstract exercise but an essential re-focusing of our hearts and of the heart of our concerns as educators as they bear on the hearts and lives of our co-learners, our students. In advancing this effort it is useful to note that these concerns are embedded in the Hebrew language and in one of the terms, Talmud ("you shall learn") known to most scholars. Relevant to education, Talmud also connotes persistence, diligence and constancy (tamud). The root is grounded, referring also to agriculture and the making of a furrow, telem. Learning is the house of a flourishing and humane society. Talmudic ("learning")2 dicta emphasize that the two most honored and blessed reasons for study are learning in order to teach and learning for the love of learning about our place in creation. Similarly, the 'mystical' tradition of Kabala emphasizes the interconnection of mind and heart, wisdom and understanding. Indeed, it takes the numeric value of the letters in the Hebrew word for heart as denoting the thirty-two channels by which pure creative wisdom gains "a habitation and a name." The integration of mind and heart, and the heart's role in sustaining understanding and empathy between us is the essence of teaching-learning. It is the confluence of wisdom and understanding that produces whatever knowledge we may attain; in learning this has a strong basis in the connection of the hearts seeking to articulate wisdom.3 At best it is what occurs in our classes: learning is an approach to the miracle of our beings... The interplay of teaching and learning is an engagement that alerts us to other aspects of the educational experience that are essential to the kind of identifications, nuanced professional-peronal relationships, mutual duties and service that assist a human being toward becoming a humane person. In memorable writings of the 1940s Eric Blair ("George Orwell") warned us that political and social forces were subjecting our language to reductive pressures, to deformations that would complicate and even preclude critical thinking and meaningful communication; that would hinder the interchange not only of ideas and information but of affect, emotion and empathy, destroying humanity at its root, language. Marooned, terrified at the savagery growing in his loneliness, Philoctetes cries out, "I have been alone and very wretched, without friend or comrade… take pity on me; speak to me; speak! Speak if you come as friends… speech, this at least we should have."4 Orwell's thesis, so powerfully articulated in these lines has become more relevant in every decade since: speech, the essence of humane discernment and connection is subjected to ever more dehumanizing reduction. It was the terror of this reversion, pushed at times by technology and instrumental judgments that partly underlay the emphasis on regression in H.G. Wells.5 "Imagine language, once clear-cut and exact…losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again." This reversion or reduction is the antithesis and undoing of the Biblical paradigm in which relationship and all bonds of intelligibility and the heart come from language, the expression of a divine soul.6 Neil Postman suggested7 there are periods when cultural (economic, political, professional) trends should be balanced by education that preserves and strengthens what is most humane in us that may be eroded by such trends. The essay by Dr. Arras prompts us to reflect on some of the more essential and primal qualities of education in an era that often compels us toward reduction, de-personalization and 'quick fix' tendencies in our institutions (not least educational ones) that impoverish language, thought, and our responses to each other, undermining or precluding genuine education, the vocation that blends heart, soul and mind, skills and fellow feeling in searching to be a more complete human being, activating, if you will, our divinity. And we are passionate, sensitive beings sometimes to a fault, as great texts for millennia have conveyed.8 To discuss the place of love in education we must consider how it requires the tempering of passion so it becomes articulate, not reflexive, so that it conduces truly to communication and growth, not solipsism and cliché. Our societies cohere to the extent that our understanding of passion includes being sensitive to each other as beings who are tasked by their nature with the job of finding and naming aspects of experience, discerning to communicate the truths in them: we learn and teach, -- we serve. Our humanity is rooted in learning to modulate the passions so that they enable us to best serve each other which is another way of saying to know who we are, for identity is a network of multi-tiered reciprocal obligations (consider the complex challenges and dilemmas of Gloucester in King Lear). To do well by each other as humane beings we must understand our place in every part of our lives, surely a lifelong process of listening, asking, doing deference, of eager and attentive patience in which perfection is a goal even the best never quite reach. To be wise in this experiential way requires compassion and nourishing a desire to learn until it learns to nourish itself, if need be until we can rejoin or rebuild a community of learners. Good teaching and learning require information, examples, symbolic analysis, case studies that nurture the courage to become who we are, courage that eventually empowers informed and moral choices. Yes, wisdom grows out of courage to learn, to struggle to understand, to grow beyond the already known, to make consequent choices. It also requires the courage and faith to receive and honor a tradition of learning, of an understanding grounded in one's father's sayings, to paraphrase Frost.9 Wisdom needs "good fences," needs channels and distinct identities to become understanding. Courage includes acceptance of contingency and gratitude to our forebears as a requisite of knowing and becoming ourselves. And to instill the courage that enables one to reach out, to stretch for a new articulation of an idea or emotion, teachers must, as Arras suggests, "care deeply about their students [and be] compelling storytellers and explainers" [op cit]. They must also find ways to convey caring and love, to open the channels between mind and heart. More specifically, to make clear that learning develops in a context of care and love for what we are and can be as teachers and learners, as humane beings, a process (lamidah) that inspires and sustains trust. Consistency of commitment, tamud - telem is an essential challenge for educators and it draws on all our faculties in teaching, study and learning (limud).10 To acknowledge this is to recognize and remind ourselves that the learning-teaching-learning cycle is both a process and a locus for modeling and experiencing humility as all participants in the classroom reach for new insight and articulations in response to studies that are the field for the group's efforts. We willingly become vulnerable: caring and trust are essential to achieve this opening of potential. In considering the essence of education we thus launch ourselves into a developing relationship that embraces the time-tested, more-needed-than-ever virtues that enable a good life: courage, humility, and wisdom, all of them supported by and growing from love, love of human beings and of what they can discover together as they gather to investigate a shared body of knowledge. All the facets of this quest are at hand when examining texts that deeply plumb the varieties of human relationship, character, and motives. It is for this reason that they are time-tested templates in which education (being 'led out of' or 'beyond' one self, e-ducare, learning to stand up, amud) occurs. Literature is central not only to the development of critical thinking and communication skills but to discussions that investigate meaningful distinctions between love and flattery, blind obedience and true service, filial piety rather than hollow pieties… almost everyone recognizes and feels deeply about these distinctions, or regrets and suffers their blurring. The first chapter of Genesis shows repeatedly that the entire creation and all coherence consists of establishing distinctions to be grouped by understanding. The instructor's task is not only to communicate passionate concern about distinctions of heart and will but to establish standards for supporting, clarifying and developing one's personal experience and response by reference to evidence that can be shared, for example, evidence in a text that all read and discuss together. The need and ability to verify opinions so that they become demonstrable to others is basic to a complete and competent adult life. In offering myriad sites and insights for such inquiry, texts (or music, case studies or art) of intellectual richness and emotional depth become an area for shared habitation, inquiry, exploration and articulation of feelings and ideas that previously were inchoate or inaccessible. They become that is, a means toward both humility and competence, to a sense of being grounded and of having a means for verification of experience that enables compassion and learning. To do this, all examples must be presented in the context of a meaningful vocabulary. It is worth noting that compassion does not mean dissolution into another person. Shared humanity and potential for growth does not, and for human beings, can never mean uniformity of capability, at least not at the same time and place. Like articulated thoughts or feelings, respect and recognition involve acknowledging distinctions, for example rate and degree of progress. There are goals to strive for, and kindness should be the context for true strength, but everyone and everything is excellent in their place, marred out of it. Good ways to make these comprehensible and acceptable ("owned") as part of our growth is to clearly define criteria for assessment and standards for achievement, and to make clear that good faith persistence matters even when not reflected wholly in a grade. Part of the process of learning is to recognize and strive to greet our times.11 Methods for achieving this assurance and caring, this love, are as numerous as there are student-teacher interactions, with the additional variable of specific subject matters and school environments. Every student and every student-teacher interface is differently nuanced, sometimes scarcely discernibly, sometimes with significant differences of method and style and, at least in the near term, outcome. And it is fine for students to see this occurring when it is done with warmth, good will, and clear devotion to the shared enterprise of building strength and humanity. In this way, modulated, shared passion and concern, compassion and curiosity become aspects of a core method of approaching life's vicissitudes and a basis for humanism that will not yield, or will not easily yield to the trends or jargon of any period; that will endure and, perhaps, provide all students with that sense of the good "old fashioned ways" that probably is necessary to every human being's feeling that their origins and also their future has the promise and reality of goodness. That times and ways have been and will be better; that we can grow and be 'led out of' our selves; that hope is true. A significant part of what all educators must model is the tempering of passion by rational inquiry which is essential to respect for the humanity within every person. There is no separating this from the method of teaching by guided discussion. Shared focus on a text saves us from the lonely and false sufficiency of confession. The instructor's guiding, based on mastery of his or her subject matter and differently pitched according to discipline, course content and level provides many important lessons and gains: among them, information that allows students to strengthen themselves, to build on, reason and reflect about and discuss the topics at hand and their relation to 'real life' situations; it demonstrates some of the 'value-added' of the degree or diploma program; it models the careful use of language to discriminate feelings and thoughts from each other and facilitates the exciting search for the most accurate (and that means, the most respectful) name or term for a thought or feeling; this kind of guidance models caring and commitment. A guided discussion that attempts to create an area in which all can participate (not everyone will; people are different and have different learning styles; reticence also needs space and respect) is an arena for growth that under the caring of a mentor who has been long engaged in the learning of which it is a facet allows students also to care passionately, to measure and clarify their responses, to learn the material and also the self-mastery that is among the surest guarantors for success in life. All learners, students and teachers have different capabilities as well as styles. It is inhumane and even horrible to proceed as if learners were units prepared by cookie-cutter or manufactured with 'zero tolerance' in some lab. There are different styles and capabilities; results will be different. Condescension is not love but more its antithesis. Standards are essential for coherence, support, structure and fairness; it also can and should be shown by manner and effort that all learners have a place at the table; that results continue to unfold over time in ways that vary with the all-but infinite variety of circumstance, environment, training, and continued learning; that the highest grades do not always measure or insure the deepest learning. These points may seem obvious but they are worth repeating in various ways a few times per term for all our sakes… All this is a way of explaining how a love of learning and teaching expresses and teaches love and a loving approach to some of the most basic responses in our lives; it teaches by showing how love should and can infuse critical thinking and discussion. Kabala stresses that the process of learning is a paradigm of the loving marital union in which knowledge is the fruit shaped of wisdom by understanding. It shows how guided discussions connect the search for knowledge that leads toward wisdom to love between teacher and students in a quest for learning and understanding; even more, discussions guided from this perspective embody this learning for love, a gracious love that builds a humble, questing courage. A courage that flourishes to the extent that there is no agenda other than this love… In footnote two, we note the remarkable insights contained within the Hebrew word shana which as a verb means, in context, "study" and/or "teach" or even "repeat," the latter being an essential aspect of learning; in our context, a demonstration of love and concern. Repetition, not a dulled rote reiteration but as a review, overview (Mishna) or re-visiting is needed not only for intellectual mastery but as part of a mutual return to a field that has been created with mutual care, concern, and commitment. To extend the interest and relevance to education of this etymology, as a noun, shana means year, rooting the cycle of learning in nature and what we know as "the academic year…" For learning to find its root in teaching, and teaching to find its context in shared inquiry it must be part of the natural cycle of our lives, a hermeneutic spiral of growth in which a human family is a type of the universe, an orderly adornment (cosmos). Every year we return to work the furrow from which a world of sustaining knowledge may sprout, each cycle enriched by past studies. It is intriguing that Hebrew the language and Judaism the unified way of life contains in the roots of central word-concepts the idea that learning and teaching not only are complementary aspects of a humane being rooted in social practice and bonding the generations in nurturance and quickening but are part of the annual honoring of the birthday of human kind,12 the beings whose creation in nature is oriented toward ceaseless learning to teach and learn still more, to be in but not purely of the realm of the senses: to humanize it. And the higher order lesson, the meta-teaching as well as our method, sketched above, -- is to learn of our contingency which is at the essence of the interdependence of teaching and learning, and of the love it generates. Space and time are one; the world is forever, both indicated by one word, olam. And the world forever hides the divinity within and around us, waiting for wisdom's channeling by the furrows of understanding. To recognize this veiled truth is to activate love.13 We are discussing inspiration, humility, love, courage and striving, the bases of education and humanity. In concluding, I will try to elaborate this bond between knowledge and humanity in a descriptive and then a metaphoric way. As learners and teachers we recognize that knowledge has affective, experiential-factual, and intellectual -- conceptual aspects to be acknowledged, explored and integrated. If our era at times has over-weighted the affective -- emotional facets then part of our task is to restore the balance with articulated experience, demonstrable facts, and concepts that are valuable because they refine and restore our capabilities as affective beings. The core of our energy as teacher-learners, and our goal as inquiring, studying humane beings is to cleanse the affective capacity by which the root knows and desires its blossoms. Like a candle flame, this completion expresses and contains the yearning that sustains it… We can sum this balancing by reference to a related point made by Professor Arras: passionate educational guiding and participation intermingles the specific and personal in response to a field of study or text and drawing on personal responses and experience; it facilitates the step-by-step acquisition of general knowledge and knowledge that can be generalized, of concepts and terms that resist and may even come to replace the clichés and jargon that imperil not only our thinking but our humanity, our humane response to ourselves and our environment. To achieve these benefits, a life of learning to teach and teaching to learn involves searching for texts or topics that engage the most critical and primal aspects of lives and presenting them in ways that are accessible and exciting, in which a lot clearly is at stake, in which relationships and themes challenge and awaken our sense of the need for informed and caring choice. "Humane discernment" indeed is intrinsic to the love, humility and courage at the heart of teaching, of helping students, and teachers become the fuller persons we wish to be, to achieve, to our best abilities, some practical wisdom, wisdom that returns like the year, like each generation to re-invigorate love, knowledge in all its significance for the stages of our life. Footnotes: 1. John D. Arras, "It's a Simple Game," CHE, 3/21/06. 2. The root of Talmud ("learning" or "study") is "teacher" (lamed); the outer or 'social' expression of a teacher is learning, 'teaching to learn.' By learning, one grows able to teach, to continue learning in a more comprehensive, a social, inter-generational way. A similar tie is conveyed by the Hebrew verb shana which means, in context, "study" and "teach" or even "repeat," an essential aspect of learning. As a noun, shana means year, rooting the cycle of learning in nature, inter-generational bonds, memory and history, what we call "the academic year…" perhaps not appreciating the full significance of its reality and root-concept. 3. Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (Weiser Books, 1997 revised edition), 25-6, 38-43. 4. In Sophocles II, David Grene translation (University of Chicago, 1957), lines 226-32. Cf. Genesis 2:18-24 which indicates how language & understanding, companionship, and generation are a unified humanity. 5. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), especially chapter 21. 6. Genesis 2:19-24. 7. Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1980). 8. Among the best known comments on this point are Hamlet's praise of what is distinctive in Horatio's character: "blest are those whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled that they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger… that man that is not passion's slave" (Hamlet 3.2.70-4). 9. "Mending Wall": "he will not go beyond his father's saying and likes it so well that he repeats it: 'good fences make good neighbors.'" And Frost gives his neighbor shrouded, in his eyes in a primeval mystery, the last words. 10. The remarkable growth of related concepts, of an entire discipline from a single three-letter root and related sub-roots is intrinsic to the antiquity and genius of Hebrew. See Isaac Mozeson, The Origin of Speeches (Lightcatcher, 2006) for an engaging and in-depth study. 11. King Lear, V.i.54; V.ii.9-11, V.iii.245-328; knowing one's time in the fullest sense is central to Shakespeare's teaching. 12. This interdependence between completion and yearning that suggests the basis of human being is aspiration and growth also is suggested by the Hebrew root chulu ("finished" or "completed"), -- "and the heaven and the earth were completed…" (Genesis 2:1) which appears in another context meaning "yearn": "my soul yearns indeed it pines for the courtyards of the Eternal One" (Psalm 84:3). As educators, we are infused with this perspective: life is complete only when yearning for the perfect place, never perfectly attained but only approached, with great care and compassion, in the classroom. 13. The Hebrew word for "the world" (ha Olam), written without vowels is identical to the word concealment, another facet of the conceptual -- scientific aspects of the ancient language. It was via this recognition that Abraham "loved" and was loved by G-d.
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