Evoking the Spirit in Public Education
by Parker J. Palmer
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
When we bring forth the spirituality of
teaching and learning, we help students honor life's most
meaningful questions.
I am a
Christian of the Quaker persuasion whose spiritual forebears
were persecuted, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their
beliefs by officials of the established church in England. When
Quakers fled to America in search of religious liberty, they met
with similar treatment at the hands of the Puritans. On Boston
Common stands a statue in memory of Mary Dyer, a middle-aged
mother of six who was hanged in 1660 before a crowd of civic
leaders and churchgoers bent on safeguarding "godly" ways
against her seditious belief in "the inner light."
So I am
no great fan of state-sanctioned religion or of the religious
arrogance that says "our truth is the only truth." As I explore
ways to evoke the spirit in public education, I want neither to
violate the separation of church and state nor to encourage
people who would impose their religious beliefs on others.
But I am
equally passionate about not violating the deepest needs of the
human soul, which education does with some regularity. As a
teacher, I have seen the price we pay for a system of education
so fearful of things spiritual that it fails to address the real
issues of our lives--dispensing facts at the expense of meaning,
information at the expense of wisdom. The price is a school
system that alienates and dulls us, that graduates young people
who have had no mentoring in the questions that both enliven and
vex the human spirit.
I reject the imposition of any form of
religion in public education, including so-called "school
prayer." But I advocate any way we can find to explore the
spiritual dimension of teaching, learning, and living. By
"spiritual" I do not mean the creedal formulations of any faith
tradition, as much as I respect those traditions and as helpful
as their insights can be. I mean the ancient and abiding human
quest for connectedness with something larger and more
trustworthy than our egos--with our own souls, with one another,
with the worlds of history and nature, with the invisible winds
of the spirit, with the mystery of being alive.
We need
to shake off the narrow notion that "spiritual" questions are
always about angels or ethers or must include the word God.
Spiritual questions are the kind that we, and our students, ask
every day of our lives as we yearn to connect with the largeness
of life: "Does my life have meaning and purpose?" "Do I have
gifts that the world wants and needs?' "Whom and what can I
trust?" "How can I rise above my fears?" "How do I deal with
suffering, my own and that of my family and friends?" "How does
one maintain hope?" "What about death?"
Inwardly, we and our students ask such questions all the time.
But you would not know it to hear us talk, for we usually talk
in settings where the imperatives of the fearful ego, or of the
task at hand, strand us on the surface of our lives, compelling
us to ask questions that are not the deepest we have: "Will that
be on the test?" or "How can I get a raise?" Our real questions
are asked largely in our hearts because it is too risky to ask
them in front of one another.
Part of
that risk is the embarrassed silence that may greet us if we ask
our real questions aloud. But the greater risk is that if we ask
a real question, someone will try to give us The Answer! If we
are to open up the spiritual dimension of education, we must
understand that spiritual questions do not have answers in the
way math problems do--and that giving one another The Answer is
part of what shuts us down. When people ask these deep
questions, they do not want to be saved but simply to be heard:
they do not want fixes or formulas but compassion and
companionship on the demanding journey called life.
Spiritual questions are the kind described by the poet Rilke in
response to an earnest student who had pressed him with question
after urgent question:
Be
patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart...Try to
love the questions themselves...Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given because you would not be able to live
them--and the point is to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answers.
Spiritual mentoring is not about dictating answers to the deep
questions of life. It is about helping young people find
questions that are worth asking because they are worth living,
questions worth wrapping one's life around.
When we
fail to honor the deepest questions of our lives, education
remains mired in technical triviality, cultural banality, and
worse: It continues to be dragged down by a great sadness. I
mean the sadness one feels in too many schools where teachers
and students alike spend their days on things unworthy of the
human heart--a grief that may mask itself as boredom,
sullenness, or anger, but that is, at bottom, a cry for meaning.
Spirituality and the Subjects
We Teach
How might we evoke the spiritual dimension of public education?
Behind the word evoke lies an important assumption: The
spiritual is always present in public education whether we
acknowledge it or not. Spiritual questions, rightly understood,
are embedded in every discipline, from health to history,
physics to psychology, entomology to English. Spirituality--the
human quest for connectedness--is not something that needs to be
"brought into" or "added onto" the curriculum. It is at the
heart of every subject we teach, where it waits to be brought
forth.
Why does
a good historian care about the "dead" past? To show us that it
is not dead at all, that we are profoundly connected to the past
in ways we may not even understand. Why does a good biologist
care about "mute" nature? To show us that nature has a voice
that calls us to honor our connection to the natural world. Why
does a good literary scholar care about "fictional" worlds? To
show us that our deepest connection with reality comes not
merely by mastering the facts but my engaging them with the
imagination.
We can
evoke the spirituality of any discipline by teaching in ways
that allow the "big story" told by the discipline to intersect
with the "little story" of the student's life. Doing so not only
brings up personal possibilities for connectedness but also
helps students learn the discipline more deeply. Leaning does
not happen when the subject is disconnected from the learner's
life.
I can
illustrate this point with a story from my own education. I was
taught the history of the Holocaust at some of the best public
schools (and private colleges) in the country. But because I was
taught the big story with no attention to the little story, I
grew into adulthood feeling, on some level, that all of those
horrors had happened on some other planet to some other species.
My teachers--who taught only the objective facts without
attention to the subjective self--distanced me from the
murderous realities of the Third Reich, leaving me more
ignorant, more ethically impaired, more spiritually disconnected
than authentic education should.
Because
my little story was not taken seriously, I failed to learn two
important things. One was that the town I grew up in, on the
North Shore of Chicago, practiced systematic discrimination
against Jews. In those days, if you were a Jew, you did not live
in Wilmette or Kenilworth or Winnetka, but in Glencoe. It was a
gilded ghetto, but a ghetto nonetheless, created by the same
anti-Semitism that gave rise to the larger evils of Hitler's
Germany--not on another planet but in my own place and time.
The
second thing I failed to learn was more personal and more
important: I have within myself a "little Hitler," a force of
darkness that will try to kill you off when the difference
between you and me becomes so great that it challenges my
conception of reality. I will not kill you with a gun or a gas
chamber, but with a word, a category, a dismissal that renders
you irrelevant to my life: "Oh, you're just a (fill in the
blank...)."
By
failing to intersect the big story with the little story, my
history teachers left me with facts about the Holocaust that
never came to life--and with a life that went unchallenged by
the reality of those horrors. Because my teachers remained
objective at the expense of the spiritual, they failed to
educate either my mind or my spirit. I learned neither about the
Holocaust as it really was, and is, nor about myself as I really
am.
When I
speak about these things with fellow teachers, I occasionally
hear an objection: "So you want us to stop being teachers and
become therapists or priests." No, that is not what I want: I
want us to become better teachers. And part of what good
teaching requires is that we stop thinking about our work in
terms of the great divides: either facts or feelings,
"hard-nosed" or "touchy-feely," intellectual or spiritual,
professors or priests.
We must
embrace the fact that teaching and learning--to say nothing of
living--take the form of paradox: They require us to think
"both-and" instead of "either-or." Teaching and learning, done
well, are done not by disembodied intellects but by whole
persons whose minds cannot be disconnected from feeling and
spirit, from heart and soul. To teach as a whole person to the
whole person is not to lose one's professionalism as a teacher
but to take it to a deeper level.
These
whole-person connections are crucial not only in the "soft"
subjects, such as history, but also in the "hard" subjects. I
know a geology teacher who asks students to keep a journal of
their daily interaction with rocks, an assignment that initially
strikes students as quite odd but that eventually helps them
understand how intertwined their lives are with the life of the
earth. I know a math teacher who helps girls succeed by dealing
empathetically with the emotional paralysis induced by the false
social message that "girls are no good at math."
The
ability to think both-and instead of either-or is a skill that
comes as we live our spiritual questions more knowingly and
openly. The surface questions of our lives may yield either-or
answers: "Shall I teach 1 st grade or 3 rd
grade next year?" But to live the deep questions we must develop
a taste for paradox--not least the paradox that some questions
have no conventional answers and yet are the only ones worth
living: "How shall I live today knowing that someday I will
die?"
The Spiritual Lives of
Teachers
Spiritual questions are embedded not only in the disciplines we
teach--they are embedded in our own lives. Whoever our students
may be, whatever subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we
are. When I hear teachers ask whether they can take their
spirituality into the classroom with them, I wonder what the
option is: As long as we take ourselves into the classroom, we
take our spirituality with us!
Our only
choice is whether we will reflect on the questions we are
living--and how we are living them--in a way that might make our
work more fruitful. "How can I get through day?" is not as
promising a question as "What truth can I witness to today?" If
we do not live good questions, and live them in a way that is
life-giving, our own deformations will permeate the work we do
and contribute to the deformation of the students whose lives we
touch.
Over the
past five years, I have worked with others to create a program
that offers public school teachers around the country a chance
for such reflection. It is a program that is centered on a
question worth living:
We
become teachers for reasons of the heart.
But many
of us lose heart as time goes by.
How can
we take heart, alone and together,
So we
can give heart to our students and our world,
Which is
what good teachers do?
The
Teacher Formation Program (also known as "the Courage to
Teach"), in partnership with the Fetzer Institute, is a two-year
sequence of eight four-day retreats for groups of 25 K-12
teachers in locales as diverse as inner-city Baltimore,
metropolitan Seattle, rural South Carolina, and central
Michigan. Its purpose is simple: to give teachers an
opportunity, in solitude and in community, to explore the
spiritual dimension of a teacher's life.
These
retreat groups gather quarterly for two years, following the
cycle of the seasons. The retreats are named after the seasons
not simply to designate their timing: Each retreat, under
skillful facilitation, draws on the metaphors of the season in
which it occurs, inviting teachers to examine the spiritual
questions that are at the heart of that season.
For
example, in the fall--when nature plants seeds that may grow
when spring arrives--we inquire into "the seed of true self" by
asking the question, "Who am I?" Retreatants explore memories of
who they were as children in order to reclaim those birthright
gifts that are so often stolen from us on the perilous passage
from childhood to adult life.
As they
answer the "Who am I?" question, retreatants are better able to
ask "Whose am I?" What is the social ecology of my life, the
place where I am planted, where I am called to give and to
receive? We pursue such questions not simply for our own sake
but for the sake of our teaching and of the young people we
serve: A teacher who works from a distorted sense of self and
community is likely to be doing more harm than good.
Of
course, the "seed of true self" that we find in the fall seems
to wither and die in the winter. But it may only be doing what
seeds in nature--wintering through until spring arrives. So in
the winter season we explore questions of darkness and death,
dormancy and renewal: What is it that seems to be dying or dead
in us? Is it really dead, or is it simply lying dormant, waiting
for its time to flower?
If we
can understand what is dormant within ourselves, perhaps we can
understand more deeply the dormancy within our students. Some
students present themselves as dead--dead to thought, to
feeling, to relationships. But a good teacher will see the true
self behind that false self-presentation, see what is dormant in
the lives of young people that can be brought to flower by good
teaching.
Seasonal
metaphors offer a way to raise deep questions about life without
blinking, while honoring the sensibilities of everyone from Jews
to Buddhists, from Muslims to secular humanists, from Christians
to those whose spirituality has no name. When we raise such
questions in the context of safe space and trustworthy
relationships, the soul can speak its truth--and people can hear
that truth in themselves and in one another with transforming
effect.
To help
that transformation along, the Teacher Formation Program
practices an uncommon form of community, one in which people
learn not to fix or save one another but to hold one another's
questions in a respectful and noninvasive way.
Community emerges when we are willing to share the real concerns
of our lives. But in our society, you are reluctant to bring
your concerns to me because you fear I am going to try to "fix"
you--and I am reluctant to receive your concerns because I fear
I am going to have to "fix" you! We have no middle ground
between invading one another and ignoring one another, and thus
we have no community. But by practicing ground rules that
release us from our mutual fears, by teaching us how to live our
questions with one another rather than answer them, the gift of
community emerges among us--a gift of transformation.
The
teachers who have participated in this program report several
important outcomes. First, they feel more grounded in their own
selfhood, more at home in their own lives, less likely to burn
out and more likely to flourish. Second, they feel that they are
better teachers, able to see their students for who they are and
to respond to them in life-giving ways. Third, they feel that
they are better citizens of their own workplaces, able to deal
with conflict from a place of peace, to advocate for change from
a place of hope.
The most
important step toward evoking the spirit in public education is
to bring teachers together to talk not about curriculum,
technique, budget, or politics, but about the deepest questions
of our teaching lives. Only if we can do this with one
another--in ways that honor both the importance of our questions
and the diversity with which we hold them--will we be able to do
it for our students, who need our companionship on their
journeys.
The
teachers with whom I work are grateful to private foundations
for creating settings outside the workplace where K-12 teachers
can do professionally relevant inner work, as am I. But someday
soon we would like to be able to express the same gratitude to a
growing number of public schools for doing something they are
not doing today: creating settings within the workplace
where teachers may reflect on questions that are worth living.
Of
course, such opportunities must be invitations, not demands. The
soul cannot be coerced into inner work, and when an employer
tries to do so, it is both ineffective and unethical. But freely
chosen inner work, done in solitude and in community, can
contribute powerfully to the well-being of teachers, of
teaching, and of the students we are here to serve. By creating
such settings, our schools would offer teachers, students, and
the mission of education they so deeply deserve.
|