educational sentiments
i ran across the following passage during my reading for a "strategies for teaching writing" class. so many of my friends are looking towards, or are already involved in education and i wanted to share it with them. this is the first article i've come across that really captures the passion and the responsibility of being a teacher and i thought i'd share it with them... and with the rest of you as well.
"She [Bell Hooks, the African American feminist and liberatory teacher] assigns great value and responsibility to the teacher as well as to the writer or person, insisting that education at every level and in every context attends to ethical formation...She invokes Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and peach and justice activist, to challenge teachers to accept the ethical responsibility of professing. Confronted with students 'desperately yearning to be touched by knowledge,'... Her answer destabilizes the contemporary, academic sense of the term profess, recalling its original sense of passionate commitment in professing a vow. She reaises the stakes for university [but really all] teachers to a level that would surely frighten many: If, as Thomas Merton suggests in his essay on pedagogy "Learning to Live," the purpose of education is to show students how to define themselves 'authentically and spontaneously in relation' to the world, then porfessors can best teach if we are self-actualized. Merton reminds us that the 'original and authentic 'paradise' idea, both in the monastery and in the university, implied not simply a celestial source of theoretic ideas to which Magistri and Doctores held the key, but the inner self of the student' who would discover the ground of their being in relation to themselves, to higher powers, to community. The purpose of education is to show a person how to define himself authentically and spontaneously in relation to the world-- not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of the individual himself... " (Guide to Composition Pedagogies 20)
we're not "just teachers". we're empowering our students to go out and change the world.
"She [Bell Hooks, the African American feminist and liberatory teacher] assigns great value and responsibility to the teacher as well as to the writer or person, insisting that education at every level and in every context attends to ethical formation...She invokes Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and peach and justice activist, to challenge teachers to accept the ethical responsibility of professing. Confronted with students 'desperately yearning to be touched by knowledge,'... Her answer destabilizes the contemporary, academic sense of the term profess, recalling its original sense of passionate commitment in professing a vow. She reaises the stakes for university [but really all] teachers to a level that would surely frighten many: If, as Thomas Merton suggests in his essay on pedagogy "Learning to Live," the purpose of education is to show students how to define themselves 'authentically and spontaneously in relation' to the world, then porfessors can best teach if we are self-actualized. Merton reminds us that the 'original and authentic 'paradise' idea, both in the monastery and in the university, implied not simply a celestial source of theoretic ideas to which Magistri and Doctores held the key, but the inner self of the student' who would discover the ground of their being in relation to themselves, to higher powers, to community. The purpose of education is to show a person how to define himself authentically and spontaneously in relation to the world-- not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of the individual himself... " (Guide to Composition Pedagogies 20)
we're not "just teachers". we're empowering our students to go out and change the world.