The following is a speech I delivered to a class of University of Alberta Education Students group in the Education North Building on September 10, 1998 (the picture is of the Old Arts Building). I was invited by Kathy Sanford, one of my former Education professors and one of the most influential teachers on my life.Many of your professors will expect you to come up with a metaphor for what you suppose teaching to be. Now it’s true that metaphors can be excellent means for exploring ideas—they can provide enlightening comparisons and contrasts, can crystallise our imaginings into a coherent order. They can also be an irritating make-work project to cover someone’s ass.
Witness:
“Teaching is medicine.”
“Teaching is gardening.”
“Teaching is architecture.”
“Teaching is war.”
These may flow from other metaphors we hear frequently, such as:
“Young people are our greatest resource.”
“Young people are our most important commodity,” or even
“Young people are our future.”
Some of these are testimony to the artlessness of speech in the 1990s. Some demonstrate a materialistic view of the world—that children are a resource, like copper, bauxite or water, or that they commodities. Commodities are products built for the sole purpose of being sold, never to be possessed by their builders. So does that mean that parents are baby factories, who design and construct child-units for sale to… to whom? To corporations? And where in these is their own will, their desire, their own decision or consideration?
To say that young people are our future is once again to turn them into our possession and our crutch. Young people do not belong to us, they are not our food nor our products, nor should they be seen as our pension-providers.
This is why I don’t think much of most metaphors related to teaching or kids. I’d say that teaching is too big, too complex to be encompassed by a single metaphor. So why bother? Why not describe teaching for what it is? Teaching is the attempt to transfer facts, understanding, skills and strategies to others so that they can successfully manipulate their environments. If very successful, teaching will help learners to develop their own approaches, possibly radically new ones, in order to discover facts, skills and strategies for the manipulation of their environments.
So there is nothing automatically noble in teaching. Thugs can teach. Thieves can teach. Bankers can teach. It is not the fact of teaching—but the facts of teaching that are our concern.
We must make our teaching a civilising act. A moral imperative… where “moral” means the drive to maximise joy and minimise pain, to maximise liberty and minimise irresponsibility.
And we do this because we recognise young people for what they are. The inheritors of all human activity to date. Whether we wish to bequeath them the evils or the honours of the past is irrelevant… it’s done. But what we tell them and how we show them what is important is the most important task—not simple of our careers, but of our lives.
Because if we understand the human past as something far greater than the folly and the greed and the self-glorification of kings, generals, lords, popes, prime ministers, presidents and CEOs—that is to say, of anybody who is a “star,” and “star” spelled backwards is “rats”—then we begin to understand that human beings are at their most glorious when they realise that competition is the law of suspicion, division and collision, but cooperation is the law of civilisation. The human past is a rich collection of all the things we must never repeat and all the wonders that are the building blocks of global decency, compassion, justice and wonder. And all our hopes rest on what those who tell and show the young—do each day.
Liars and fools blame human nature, and point to war, greed, hatred and say, “Well, that’s human nature.” These same liars and fools are silent in the face of the billions of parents who sacrifice for their children, who tuck them into bed or feed them or say “I love you.” They are silent in the face of our most delicate and beautiful literatures, our most compassionate deeds or service, our most meaningful strivings for justice. Because it is beyond their ken to have faith. Because they are cynics.
Cynics are people who never cheer or celebrate, except to congratulate themselves for having successful predicted failure. The blood of cynics is purple, not red. It carries not oxygen, but despair. Despair is the betrayal of our ancestors and the abandonment of our descendants
But you will know teachers by their faith.
What is faith?
Faith in young people means belief in life, life’s power, in life energy. The ability to heal, the inevitability of joy. Faith is the exhilaration of that comes walking a winter field, surrounding by ice and cold wind, and knowing that beneath your feet sleep the seeds that will be the harvest of autumn and the forests of your children.
Faith is in every molecule that is you when you teach, defying decay and despair and saying, “Humans are too good to be dumped into the recycle bin of the universe… and are to good to be neglected, rejected, dejected, abandoned, imprisoned, laid-off, downsized, right-sized.” Human beings already are the right size. You teach because you know that without skill, ability cannot triumph. And you teach because you know that without curiosity, constructiveness and compassion, ability and skill are merely the tools of the greedy, the vain and the pernicious.
Teachers. We believe that we must do as at least as well as was done for us, if we can, better, and never do what was done to us.
Teaching means going into the classroom and working with kids and holding and folding and molding the joys and wonders and glories of the human mind connected to all past, present and future human minds! Don’t talk about the Internet like it’s something new. It’s been around since the first humans uttered the first sounds and made the first hand signs and carved the first characters. It’s human communication designed to store what was in order to make the greatest of what will be.
Vicissitudes—the changing fortunes of life. You will find many days that may nearly break your spirits. The parent who claims you are perverting his child by getting him to think for his own damn self. The child who makes it her pet project to make you miserable every minute or every class on every day. But there will be the kid who sees you at K-Days, or at Safeway, or takes away your plate at a wedding reception, the kid whose smile bursts like fireworks to see you again. And how often it will be the kid whose name you may not even remember, or the kid who you though ignored or hated you. Because you reached into the well of his own heart, and gave him to drink of the water or life. Vicissitudes. The changing fortunes of life.
Then there are the sissitudes. As in “sissy.” The colleagues who tell you or imply to you that you can’t do it that way because they’ve never done it that way and they’ve always done it another way and why would anyone want to do it that way anyway? Sissy as in those who have stopped trying or believing decades ago or who have believed the lies of those who want to tear apart our profession and have Bill Gates as each person’s personal Great Gazoo or guardian angel. Those people who think corporations in schools will make our country and our world a better place.
Defy them. Break moulds. Smash idols. Unlearn. Abandon false temples. And reveal. Reveal all the truths long suppressed.
Teach it.
Posted by Malcolm Azania.
