Reflections
Over the years, I have been concerned over what I view as the seriously truncated understanding of what teaching entails that is now commonly held. Taken hold in most peoples’ minds, it seems, is a very narrow and limited view of teaching, one focused almost solely on the acquisition of knowledge and the instructional aspects of teaching. Through these lessons, however, I have come to understand the cognitive and teaching presences. I now appreciate that teaching is a very complex affair with a depth, breadth, and, indeed, a power seldom recognized. I believe a limited understanding also exists concerning what is involved in learning and how it comes about.
I now see teaching and learning as an inherently and inescapably a moral matter. This reality should be more openly accepted. Education in any form, in fact, is a moral matter, and cannot be otherwise. I have often said that teachers are professors of ethics, for what they do, how they behave, and what they value. You are not just instructors, but are also the chief lesson and the only one that they can be sure every student in their classes will learn. This concept was first proclaimed to educators, as far as I know, by L. Thomas Hopkins in 1936 when he stated, “What a teacher really teaches is himself.” Rudyard Kipling penned these related and most memorable lines, my personal favorites:
No printed word nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be.
Not all the books on all the shelves, but what the teachers are themselves.
The historian and educator, Will Durant, made essentially the same point when he expressed the view that “educators should be chosen not merely for their special qualifications but more for their personality and their character because we teach more by what we are than by what we teach.” Teachers are first and foremost persons, unique individuals who bring to the classroom their attitudes, their dispositions, ways of thinking, manners of speech, dress, sources of joy, and a host of other factors. Inevitably, these matters are a part of their teaching; and, in fact, are very much a part of the reason teachers achieve the results they do. Teachers have a moral atmosphere that radiates into space and is picked up—learned—by others who spend time with them.
Of utmost importance is the teacher’s belief about the nature of mankind. How one goes about teaching and guiding youth depends a great deal on what one thinks humans are like. One’s beliefs about human capacities and their potential determine the “take” one uses in approaching educational experiences. Advancing the middle school ideals requires educators to have a genuinely positive view about human potential because helping in-transition young adolescents to believe in themselves is perhaps the number one job of middle school teachers. Unfortunately, this crucial task is seldom placed front and center, as it was in the early days of the middle school movement; while school policies and practices have come to work directly against helping young adolescents view themselves positively with hope (consider the whole grading and evaluation scenario). I have often suggested that middle school teachers should put the following sentence on a card and tape it to their desk where inevitably it will frequently come to mind:
If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is, but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
…Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Learning is natural, inborn, intuitive, and ongoing. To live is to learn. Learning is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. And it carries a sense of satisfaction. Learning, in the words of Gilbert Highet, is: “A feast for the mind and spirit and a source of lasting joy.” Learning is not just what results from instruction. We learn through our emotions, our aspirations, and our bodies as well as strictly through our minds. And we learn best by discovery. We rarely stop to recognize—and wonder at as we should—how much infants and toddlers learn on their own, without anyone formally teaching them.
Human life involves many aspects. These aspects are not compartmentalized; they are without borders, interrelated, and connected. This reality is the basis for the “whole child” concept. It is not possible to isolate the “student as scholar” and teach that entity. In an educational activity or experience, for instance, that is centered on the intellectual aspect; social, emotional, physical, and even aesthetic aspects will come into play, whether consciously or not. Richard Lipka’s statement that “Cognitive learning is hard-won by someone whose life is in affective disarray” is telling.
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