Clarity for Teachers: Day 25
‘Be as loving as a child. To everyone.’
I’m looking at today’s card and I’m thinking about my son. He’s four and a half and his favoured mode of communication with the world just now is issuing commands. Some days we try to work on the language of invitation and gratitude; other days we just do (or don’t do) what he says.
Be as loving as a child. Is this any particular child — or a generic figure of innocence, the kind you find on a card with a sentimental poem? What is the truth behind such invocations of childhood?
‘Childhood psychological damage … is routinely inflicted on most people, especially in “progressive” cultures’. My friend Jamie Moran wrote that as an aside in an essay that he sent the other day. I’ve been meaning to ask him to say more.
If we carry some damage that was done to us in childhood — some of it perhaps inevitable, much of it probably done with the best of intentions — then we also carry a memory of how it was before that damage happened. Before we were folded by experience, folded to fit the shape of classrooms and systems of assessment. (Thinking of Rilke again, as on Day 11.)
The master of improvisation Keith Johnstone developed his brilliant, simple, devastating methods as a young schoolteacher. He’d been given the class of the ‘unteachables’. Working out what he could do together with these troubled and resistant kids, he was also finding his own way back from what his schooling had done to him. He describes the realisation of how his body had become tightened up, closed down, stuck as a result of the lessons — spoken and unspoken — that school had taught him. Something of this happens to most of us in the years of our formal education, and not only in the physical body. Mostly, the results become internalised as just ‘how things are’.
In my mid-thirties, I found myself back in the classroom as a beginner in a new language. Many of my classmates were in vulnerable situations, where the whim of a teacher could determine whether they had money for food that week — but even as one of the lucky ones, I was still as close as an adult is likely to come to the situation of a child in school. I saw patterns that I recognised from childhood, only now I had an adult’s eyes to read them and to defend myself where needed. There were three kinds of teacher: the ordinary ones who accepted the power implicit in the role; the bad ones who abused that power to compensate for whatever damage they were carrying; and the good ones, who were able to set aside the role and its power, so that the classroom became a space of people being human together.
‘People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity,’ Johnstone writes, ‘as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities.’
I had some wonderful teachers in my childhood. Two in particular stand out in memory: Judith Kent, who taught me in my final year of junior school, and Richard Fenn, at the school where I spent the next two years. What strikes me, when I think of them now, is how little they had in common, except that both were vividly themselves. I remember them as people who cared, who got excited and curious and enthusiastic, and who weren’t afraid to admit where their knowledge ran out. I realise that I met them — and enjoyed meeting them, in the way one may enjoy meeting someone in adult life — whereas I don’t seem to have met more than a handful of the other teachers I had.
It’s not easy being a parent — and the way we’ve been doing things around here, lately, a good deal of parenting is outsourced to strangers with teaching certificates. I don’t envy anyone who enters the teaching profession, but I do greatly admire those who are able to remain vividly alive in loco parentis with a room full of kids.
The journey that followed the end of my formal education was about getting out from under its blessings and its curses. I’ve had cause to be grateful for both, but only once I could turn them to other ends. And the turns in that journey were moments of coming alive, recovering the curiosity and enthusiasm I’d had when I was five years old.
In Johnstone’s writings on improvisation, it’s clear that he’s not describing a specialist performance skill, but a practice through which people come alive. The theatre has given him a cover story for things that might be taught under other names in a culture less stripped of language for the sides of reality that elude measurement.
My son will be five this summer. In England, he’d be starting school, so I have to admit I’m glad we live in Sweden, where he’ll have another year spent mostly running around outdoors with a gang of three to six year olds. I know his current phase of playing the dictator is partly developmental, partly the effect of how many times a day he gets told what to do, by us or his preschool staff. I see the ways he is shaped by his environment and I don’t always like it or know what to do.
But I see the fire in him and in his friends, the capacity for total absorption, playfulness and curiosity. To be loving as a child is not to be sweet, or ever thoughtful, but to be on fire with life — and to light a fire in others.
Västerås, 1 April, 2020
This is the twenty-fifth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
