“O Captain! My Captain!” 🚢: Can Teachers Also Be Friends?

I think a lot about the teacher from Dead Poets Society, John Keating. He was so good that the institution couldn’t handle him. The “barbaric yaw” of his classroom rocked the boat so much that he fell overboard. I always wanted a teacher like John Keating. And when I started teaching, I wanted to be him (I at least nailed the shabby, academic’s wardrobe.).

In the movie, Keating accomplishes the remarkable. He befriends his students in a way that encourages transformation in and out of the classroom. This, apparently, was too much for institutionalized education. But it’s so important to understand for education that impacts daily life. It’s the kind of teaching, I imagine, we’d all like to do.

Keating made me consider the purpose and possibility of this kind of transformative friendship. Is it required that a teacher love his learners in this way? What does it accomplish? Is it something magical that only happens by chance? Or can we build it as a pillar of our educational philosophy?

So let’s take a jaunt through the history of friendship and education to find an answer. We’ll look at one old thinker and another more recent one. Then we’ll draw some conclusions.

Socrates it to me, friend

According to Socrates, in order to have a friendship that makes us better people, we need to know two things. First, we need to know that we aren’t wise. Second, we need to agree that we would like to be. In other words, Socrates’ idea of friendship starts with humility and progresses toward wisdom.

Let me reframe this in non-philosophical language. To do so, keep in mind that “wisdom” here is a bit more than just having knowledge or skill. It’s more akin to loving the right things in the right way.

With that in mind, let’s consider two friendly fishermen as examples. Socrates says that for two fishermen to be friends, they need to understand in what ways they aren’t good at fishing and agree that they both love fishing so much that they’d like to become excellent at it. And they do this because they love fishing (not because they want to be famous or rich).

Isn’t this basically what happens in the best student-teacher relationships? The John Keating kind of friendship reaches something fundamentally transformative in our experience. The best teacher-learner relationships call on our common desire to find answers that make life better — more enjoyable, more disciplined, more purposeful — in and out of the classroom. In other words, transformative friendship between teachers and learners requires teaching beyond knowledge.

Teach beyond knowledge, teach beyond the classroom

The successful, Japanese music teacher Shinichi Suzuki provides us a wonderful example of what it means to call on a learner’s desire for a better life. Suzuki developed a philosophy of teaching music that blends rigor with love. The result is learning that blossoms in daily life.

His learners were required to push themselves to the greatest extent of their abilities through difficult practice and memorization. But, he believed, in order to reach their full potential, learners also had to connect their rigorous practice with “a way of life” that was connected to love. Here’s how he described his purpose:

[O]ur purpose does not lie in a movement to create professional musicians, but to create persons of a beautiful mind and fine ability. We engage in human education through music so that children will grow with beautiful and high sensitivity, through an unparalleled, uniquely musical approach.

While professional development was important to Suzuki, it came second to developing character through music. By now, you might have reached a point that I did when researching this article. I had to ask myself, But how? How is it done?

Here’s an example of how Suzuki did it. This is an assignment he gave his students:

Now you are going to play great concertos of Bach and Mozart, and you must try to catch the hearts of Bach and Mozart in their music. You must practice every day to catch the feelings of others without words. Look at your mother and father. Can you see how they feel? Try to see when your mother needs your help before she asks. Then it is too late. If you practice every day, watching not to harm anyone by what you say, and also trying to catch how they feel, then you will develop sensitivity toward the feelings of others. Perhaps later you will catch the hearts of Bach and Mozart in their music.

The skill required to interpret Bach and Mozart related to a skill that would make life better, so Suzuki made the connection for his learners. He gave them a deeper motivation in their practice than technical mastery of a piece of music. He called on a more fundamental love in order to inspire a love for music. In this way, Suzuki became a friend to his learners

What does this mean today?

By focusing on these deeper goals, a teacher can be a very specific and important kind of friend. It can’t be forced. Some students won’t develop this fundamental love for how your subject might transform their lives beyond the classroom. What’s sadder, some teachers won’t ever try to inspire it.

But perhaps if we’re aware of what makes this kind of friendship possible, if we’re aware that it doesn’t require a formal educational setting, we won’t be stuck waiting for it to happen. Instead, we can start the course, week, or day with the possibility of it in view. We can show up prepared.

Prepared, in this case, means blending those essential qualities of expertise and humility, of rigor and love. Even as experts in our respective fields, we can remind ourselves there’s much we don’t know and would like to find out. And this happens to be the perfect place to begin a transformative friendship with our learners. We greet them by saying, “I was in your place once. Let me help you become an expert. Even better, let me help you make your life better.”

Bonus Material: Three ways to apply this idea

• Practice design through empathy. Starting this kind of friendship with your learners starts before they arrive. Even before you know your exact learners, you can build general categories of the learners you teach to understand their aspirations and challenges more precisely. We’ve designed a course on this here.
• Find out about the goals of your learners. Take a moment at the start of a course or lesson to ask your learners how they’re hoping to improve their lives through your course. If you’re a chef, you might find they want to prepare a meal for a friend or partner. If you’re a mechanic, maybe you’re helping someone develop a hobby to do with his or her kid. Asking this will not only make the information conscious to your learners, it’ll give you the opportunity to follow-up and connect personally with them.
• Connect assignments to life. If you’ve done the two things above, be sure to follow up. Ask your learners if they’ve accomplished their goals or if they’ve seen their lives improve. Better yet, ask them to help someone else with their new skills. In doing so, you’ll ensure that the friendship you start with your learners multiplies.

Thousands of teachers use Pathwright every day to design and teach courses to their team, class, or anyone in the world. If you’d like to design a course, we invite you to try out Pathwright for free. You’ve got nothing to lose!