Category Archives: Education

Education

More Than Talking

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“I had some really delicious Indian and Sri Lankan food the other day. It was great!”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Either the call dropped or you’re ignoring me.”

“No no, I’m here.”

So why the lack of response? That’s the question I was left asking myself after a phone conversation this morning. Why the lack of response?

As an educator, I am constantly looking for ways to demonstrate to my students that someone is listening to them. When they speak, I respond. When they tell me something they’ve done or something they’re excited about, I ask questions about it, wish them luck, or tell them I hope they have a great time. If they tell me that something is wrong, I ask what I can do to help. I remind them that they can always come chat if they need to. I leave sticky notes on their desks asking if they’re okay today.

A huge element of teaching is about developing relationships. If my students know that I care about them, they are more likely to learn in my classroom. We can have challenging conversations when they feel that their voices are being heard, their opinions matter, and their ideas will be taken seriously.

When classroom cultures develop around these attitudes and behaviors, real dialogue takes place. Real learning happens.

Last week, my grade ten students wanted to continue a Socratic Seminar that I thought we’d completed. They clearly had more to say, so we went with it. They started off by asking questions about the relationship between religion and violence; over an hour later, we were deep in a discussion about renewable energy.

My students’ questions drove the conversation. As vocal students willingly expressed uncertainty, they encouraged quieter peers to speak up and provide their thoughts and questions. Some students explained that they’d changed their minds over the course of our discussion, while others remained convinced of their own ideas. Some wavered back and forth and laughed at their own equivocating. Others admitted to feeling a general sense of uncertainty and apprehension that hadn’t occurred to them before our discussion.

It didn’t really matter.

The point was that they’d talked. They’d heard each other. They were willing to be open and vulnerable, question their classmates, express their ideas, and respond to challenges from their peers. They didn’t just talk; they listened. Through listening, they learned. They operated in the safe space that we’ve created this year, and they learned as a result.

Cultivating dialogue is vital with students, and equally so among adults.

But why is it so difficult?

One factor that I think makes dialogue challenging is being present. We spend a lot of time with our attention torn between one thing or another – email, social media, back-to-back meetings and deadlines, a pervasive need to “be there” with multiple people at once. We live in a society in which “busy” often denotes “good”. We feel the need to justify spending time alone or with just one other person.

I would like to advocate that we take a deep breath and a step backwards. The students in front of me are enough and they deserve my complete attention. The friend who joins me for coffee is enough and deserves my complete attention. The person on the other end of the line is enough and deserves my complete attention.

When I give you my complete attention and respond to you and what you’ve said, dialogue will take place. If I am only half-listening, if I am only partially there with you, dialogue is simply not possible.

In addition to practicing compassion, I am also working on being present. I want to listen to you. I want to hear you. I want to see you. This way, we can engage in dialogue, affect change, and make the world a better and more peaceful place.

 

Education

Practicing Compassion

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Compassion is very high up there on the list of values I use to guide my actions and decisions. Showing compassion means working towards an understanding of others’ beliefs, actions, behaviors and demonstrating that understanding to them.1 Understanding where others are coming from and verbalizing that understanding, when appropriate, paves the way for dialogue. Dialogue is essential if we are going to build a better and more peaceful world.

In doing so, I separate actions from individuals. It’s not you, it’s what you did. This means that people are not inherently wrong or evil or bad, but their actions may be. In an educational context, there is therefore room for self-reflection and self-improvement. If we explicitly work with students to label behaviors or actions as unacceptable, instead of individuals themselves, we lay the foundation for choosing to be better.2

Where I’ve consistently run into trouble, however, is when I start thinking about the truly “bad people” who don’t fit into the metric I use with my students. These people are Pol Pot and Hitler and Stalin and ISIS. They are people who have murdered, harmed, broken millions of innocent lives. These “bad people” have always been a barrier for me when I think about showing compassion to all humanity, which means I haven’t been very compassionate at all.

Last week, I had a conversation with a friend where I shared my thoughts on how to approach students who act and behave in ways that harm others and need to change. My friend, also an educator, suggested that harm comes from two areas, insanity or ignorance. Insanity could be the result of anything from undiagnosed illness to lack of attachment in infancy to an emotionally-driven crime of passion, which made sense to me as an explanation. Ignorance, however, made me squirm. I accept ignorance from young people because they need to be taught before we can expect them to actively choose not to harm others. I am not as forgiving of adults, however, because they should know better.

My friend commented that such a vein of thinking seemed like dangerous territory, and we changed the subject.

In my personal quest to be a better person, I recently started reading Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard.3 I read the following passage while on the treadmill a couple days ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since:

At first sight, it may seem incongruous to treat an enemy with kindness: “He wants to harm me, why should I wish him well?” But Buddhism’s reply is simple: “Because he doesn’t want to suffer either, because he too is under the sway of ignorance. Because this ignorance makes him harm others.” True altruism consists of wishing that the harm-doer become aware of his deviance and thus stop harming his fellow beings. This reaction, which is the opposite of the wish to avenge and punish by inflicting more suffering, is not a sign of weakness, but of wisdom.

I read that paragraph twice. Continued my run, read a few more pages, and then went back and read it again.

That’s when I understood what my fellow educator meant about dangerous territory when commenting on my (not so rational) rationale for blame.

Buddhism teaches that ignorance causes suffering. Ricard explains ignorance as “the mental confusion that deforms reality and gives rise to an array of mental obstructions such as hatred, compulsive desire, jealousy, and pride.” This nuanced definition of ignorance, rather than the colloquial “lack of knowledge and understanding,” and the link between ignorance and suffering, have fundamentally shifted my understanding of practicing compassion.

If ignorance causes suffering, we need to find the root of that suffering and help each individual overcome it so that we can put a stop to harm.

Searching for the root of suffering and helping others overcome it is compassion.

If ignorance → suffering → harm, then placing blame on those who are ignorant certainly does put us in dangerous territory. Well spotted, educator friend.

Understanding leads to action. Action, in this case, means forgiveness. It means moving past the harm, terror, and despair and moving toward a positive, constructive, and open-minded way of approaching all people in the best interest of building peaceful societies for all humanity. Action means ameliorating circumstances and situations that cause ignorance, so that ignorance does not cause suffering, so that suffering does not cause harm. It means figuring out where the problems are likely to be before they manifest as the mental obstructions that Ricard defines as ignorance.

I admit, my fresh understanding is 48 hours old and has all the fragility that comes with novelty. Accepting this idea, that ignorance and insanity lead to harm and violence but no one is at fault, is challenging. There’s a glittering, shimmery bubble somewhere in my chest that feels like it’s expanding when I roll this perspective over in my head. I think that bubble is hope. And then I start to think about the implications of what I’m even considering, all the work that has to be done personally and as a society, and I feel the edges of that bubble blur and waver, almost contracting. I recognize what is happening, focus on hope again, and feel the bubble swell.

This is likely why we call it practicing compassion. Practice is an ongoing effort at improvement that gets easier over time and eventually turns into maintenance of a skill. Remaining purposefully aware of the shifts in my own thinking will, ultimately, translate into habits of mind and behavior. Compassion has always been important to me as a value, so now the challenge is to be compassionate in practice.

Suggested Reading

    1. 10 Ways to Have Peaceful, Loving Relationships
    2. Labeling Behavior, Not People
    3. Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard

 

Education

Building Peace is the Purpose of Education

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Lately I’ve been doing extensive reading, thinking, and writing about the purpose of education. Why do we have schools? What are they for? What should they be for?

I alluded to the plethora of research and opinions on precisely this question in my last post on education and I’d like to take the opportunity to explore this idea further. This post is the result of my reflections on research that rang true to me.

In a student paper for the Morehouse College newspaper in 1948, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals. . . . We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” (emphasis added)

King is by no means the only one to claim that teaching intensive, critical thinking is an essential aspect of education. He does, however, highlight an equally important point about why education must go further. Developing humans involves so much more than efficiency and intelligence. King clearly recognized this with the addition of character. Education must be about more than intelligence; it must also encompass humanity.

In this article, Jonathan Cohen, cofounder and president of the National School Climate Center, answers precisely the question I posed at the start of this post. He says, “I think that my view, and most people’s view, is that the purpose of education is to support children in developing the skills, the knowledge, and the dispositions that will allow them to be responsible, contributing members of their community—their democratically-informed community. Meaning, to be a good friend, to be a good mate, to be able to work, and to contribute to the well-being of the community.” (emphasis added)

As the article suggests, there is a disconnect between what we claim we want out of education and the values that exist in today’s society. If we want our students to become good friends and good mates we need to do more than tie curriculum, teacher evaluation, and school funding to standardized tests.

Cohen’s explanation includes the necessity of “soft skills” that are not measurable. If we want to create communities, societies, and environments that are democratically informed, we need to include civics in our schools. Teaching and learning civics involves real-world situations in which students interact with people who are different from them, engage in real projects in their communities that mirror what we hope they’ll do as adults, and participate in much-needed dialogue about how to improve neighborhoods, cities, countries, and ultimately the world.

This is not happening in schools right now.

One reason that the purpose of education is so hard to pin down is simply that there are multiple purposes. There is more than one right answer to this question, unlike many of the questions students encounter on the standardized tests that serve as our measures of what they know.

In a piece for Forbes, Kim Jones, CEO of the nonprofit online education service Curriki, captures precisely this point. “Education does not have a single purpose; it serves multiple objectives, and the relative importance of each of these objectives can be very personal.  The varied emphasis is a result of the diverse economic, social, spiritual, cultural, and political realities of our individual lives. Likewise, how we deliver instruction, and how we measure success in school as a predictive indicator of our future success in society and, indeed, one could argue the metrics for society’s success as a whole, must be updated to match.” (emphasis added)

If we want our students to do more than answer closed questions with no opportunity for creative thinking, we need to emphasize concepts rather than facts in our curricula. The diversity of society provides students with wonderful opportunities to learn, grow, communicate, and be part of a larger whole.

When interacting in the real world, no one tests facts. We use Google. We do, however, rely on concepts in all areas of our thinking. In daily activities, we understand ideas like change, relationships, global interaction, identity, development, communication, connection, systems, and culture. These concepts can and should drive our teaching and learning. If this is what we expect of adults, why do we approach students and schooling any differently?

To return to Cohen’s point, does our society encourage such thinking? If not, as Jones suggests, society needs to definitively decide what we want. If we want informed, participatory citizens whose knowledge and experiences are based in the diversity of our daily lives, is that what we are creating in schools?

What we say we want and what we are doing do not match up. Therefore, education reform is necessary to align real life goals and success.

In an article for the Washington Post, Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology, writes, “Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship. Knowledge of the natural and engineered environments and how people live in the world is critical to all three purposes of education. Critical thinking, creativity, interpersonal skills and a sense of social responsibility all influence success in life, work and citizenship.” (bolded emphasis added)

Success in life, work, and citizenship clearly requires more than what we currently allow for students.

At this point, it seems clear that these stated purposes of education do not reflect the reality of our current educational system. We might claim, holistically, that we want community-minded citizens who interact with one another in a variety of contexts to work towards developing societies that are better than we what have today. However, the inflexibility of the school day, lack of teacher input in curriculum, lack of teacher and student collaboration, minimal room for dialogue, and prescriptive testing do not allow us to develop those citizens.

I argue further, however, that it is not enough to develop better societies. I will explore the word “better” so that we have a clearly defined idea in mind.

To me, better means more peaceful. I desperately want to educate well-rounded, community-oriented citizens who are productive members of societies that work together to create a more peaceful world. That peaceful world is inherently better than the world we have today.

Red tape and government aside, what do we do? How do we develop the people who are necessary to create this peaceful world?

I came across the closest thing to an answer that I could find in a wonderful article in Psychology Today, a publication that I sometimes use in my psychology teaching.

In the article, Buddhist physician Alex Lickerman explains, “To achieve world peace—to create a world in which war ceases to break out—seems impossible because of the sheer number of people who haven’t yet mastered themselves, who haven’t tamed their ambition to raise themselves up at the expense of others, and who haven’t learned to start from today onward, letting past wrongs committed by both sides remain in the past. In short, it seems an impossible dream because we’re in desperately short supply of human beings who are experts at living.”

Yes, the bolded emphasis is mine and yes, I am aware that I bolded the whole thing. If you’re only going to read one of the articles I’ve linked, I vote for this one.

When I read Alex Lickerman’s words, for the first time, I had one thought in my head: Of course this is what we want. Of course.

The concept of using education to develop human beings who are experts at living seems like the obvious solution to all of our problems. Experts are people who have been trained in some sort of specialized skill or knowledge area. Using their training, they yield results in their fields. They are the people we turn to with our questions. We rely on them, trust them, and sometimes even admire them.

By definition, experts at living will be successful, which we have already determined is one stated purposes of education. Furthermore, they will be intensive and critical thinkers, creative, and uphold a sense of social responsibility towards others in order to make the world a better, more peaceful place.

Developing experts at living obviously requires much, much more than we are currently doing in our schools.

In the Forbes piece, Jones suggests a practical model for exposing students to the real-world problems that they will later face as experts. She explains, “The children should be making things. The children should be writing computer programs. They should be learning by doing. The thing is not to learn excel or such programs, it is to learn to learn.” (bolded emphasis added)

Giving our students access to complex problems and gradually increasing that complexity over time has the added benefit of bringing very real moral, ethical, and global issues into our classrooms and conversations. This will help create human being of intelligence and character, as King mentioned, who are responsible members of communities.

Altruism, empathy, caring, and compassion must all play a role in creating these experts at living.

In this vein, Lickerman further specifies his vision for how to build peace. He writes, “An expert at living isn’t a person who never experiences greed, anger, or stupidity but rather one who remains in firm control of those negative parts (which can never be entirely eliminated), who’s able to surmount his or her darkest negativity, and displays a peerless ability to resolve conflict peacefully.” (bolded emphasis added)

We need to be teaching our students how to get along in the world. How to live in the world, how to be part of the world, how to care about the world and its people, and how to improve the world. Again, this means peace.

My ninth and tenth grade students write and share analyses of current events every two weeks in class. Predictably, war comes up ore often than not. They write about being so tired of war and I ask about how we can build peace. My students have seemingly endless ideas about waging war, but rarely consider the alternative – building peace. More importantly, they’re very skeptical about the viability peace processes. This indicates that we are not doing enough to bring peace to the forefront of our classrooms, our communities, our societies, and our world. We expect the next generation to fix the problems of today, but we first need to decide as a society that we are going to give them the tools to do that.

We don’t have to focus exclusively on how and why we have war. We can choose to create experts at living instead, and we can train those experts at living to build peace.

As a society, we have an education system in which we claim to want critical, democratic, participatory, inclusive thinkers and citizens, but that is not what we are building. Instead, we have an overemphasis on numbers, scores, tests, and measuring. There is dissonance in what we say we want and what we are currently doing.

That can change.

It needs to change.

But how? I’m in the midst of working on a project with a friend to articulate what education should actually look like in terms of developing experts at living who work for peace. There will be more thoughts on this in the future.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what you think! The comments section is your section and it’s open to ideas. Hope to hear from you!

Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge, and through human ways. – The Dalai Lama