The way we teach reflects our life philosophy

As a developing teacher, I often struggled with an unpleasant feeling when being a student in the classroom, or watching other teachers teach. After many conversations with my classmates, I realised that this feeling was a common experience for many. I later found out that this was a heavily discussed issue in the education world. What I am referring to, is the feeling of apathy, or disengagement, caused by the belief that the activities of schooling provided no value to the student. This is not a new phenomenon, despite how much some oppressor elites may intentionally muddy the waters of public discourse by framing this issue as one caused by ‘kids these days.’ The introduction to Radical School Reform, published back in 1969, drew alarm to how the excitement of learning in students was being shrivelled up through their school experience.

However, while my peers seemed apathetic to their own apathy about school, my own feelings were a cause for concern. How could I be someone who loved reading, writing, and all other modes of learning, believe fervently in the power of education to better society, but hate attending school or being in the classroom?

For many years, I had to just live with this contradiction. To prepare my lessons, I would always have to plan from scratch. Whenever I instead tried to start from a template from another teacher or a textbook, the flow of content would just be wrong. I would be overwhelmed by all the contradictions, points where misunderstandings were bound to arise, and statements that were to be taken as matter of fact without reason. Inevitably, it would always lead to starting again from scratch. My early lessons were far from perfect, but they felt different to other teachers from the very beginning. I felt engagement from students, and the feeling that they were safe in the classroom. I always struggled to put into words how my teaching (and by extension, the teaching of Atlas) was different, but I would end up with vague descriptions like, “the kids seem to be happy, and want to be here.”

But I couldn’t truly be happy with this, because the contradiction persisted. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that what I did as a teacher was as different as speaking a different language compared to other teachers. I tried fiercely interrogating my perceptions, my biases, my limitations. I was so sure that it must just be some sort of sub-conscious arrogance, that I just had a silly belief that I was better than the other teachers, which was why I couldn’t watch them teach or pick up any new teaching ideas from them.

I want to share two ideas that helped resolve this contradiction for me. The first one, to the best of my knowledge, originates from the Stoic school of philosophy founded in Ancient Greece, and has been assimilated into many later schools of thought, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is a major modern psychotherapy treatment.   

What this quote and idea draws attention to, is that there is a difference between the objective reality of things in the world, and our interpretations about them. An event simply happens, and we choose to assign good/bad judgements to them. Stoicism encourages us to foster our awareness of this and interrogate our perceptions so that we may avoid causing ourselves suffering that can be avoided, or to act unwisely. To give an example in a schooling context, the existence of an exam is an objective reality, but a student can reflect on how they want to perceive it. Is an exam necessarily a bad thing, because the student will have to study for it, and may perform badly? Or can the exam be seen as a source of motivation for the student to refine their understanding and then challenge themself where the potential negative outcomes are quite trivial, afterwards receiving feedback on how to progress on their learning journey?

This idea extends beyond the individual. In observing others, we can trace their objective actions to their subjective perceptions that informed those acts. This was one major revelation for me. The way that a teacher teaches, is influenced by their perceptions of their students. It sounds obvious when written out like that.

The second idea is one that I discovered in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. Freire writes about a philosophy where human beings are born incomplete and embark on a journey of development towards their own completion. What makes a human being complete, or more accurately, what makes one become human (which is why they are incomplete before that), is the attainment of freedom. Freedom means to understand that the world can be shaped by their actions, and to pursue a life of work do so. In this context ‘work’ is meaningful and fulfilling, and to be contrasted to ‘labour’ which is exploitation (drawing from Marxist theory).

According to this philosophy, the purpose of education is hence to help children attain their freedom. This is opposed to a traditional/industrialist view of education being to teach students ‘skills’ that will allow them to participate in the workforce. Education that is merely about the acquisition of skills pays no concern to the humanisation of students, opting instead to focus on information that must be unchanging, from its transmission from the teacher-authority to its deposition into the student. The student makes no change to this information, their lived experience has no relevance to the information, they are just a storage box. Rote-learning is not a just a boring method of instruction, but the preferred style of teaching for this model.

Time to tie both ideas together. This soulless way of teaching is only possible if the inner perception of the teacher is congruent with its philosophy. The oppressor believes that the oppressed deserve to be oppressed. A teacher can only engage with this teaching if they have no belief in the human potential of their students. This sounds harsh but is undeniable when we use literal classroom examples. Why is speaking out in classroom so heavily frowned upon? When a student learns something, their worldview has been transformed. This is both an intellectual and emotional experience. Like the audience in a cinema gasping at a shocking twist, do students, who are living beings, not deserve an outlet to express their feelings? Traditionalist teachers will bring up all sorts of justifications for firm discipline. These students need to be shouted down, punished into silence for their own good. They will claim that any dialogue that a student is having must be a distraction and cannot contribute to their understanding of the lesson. What is evident is their perception of students throughout all of this. The best students are those who are the most silent and accurate memory sticks of information. There is no value in any attempt by the student to alter the information or the classroom, which by extension means that there is no value in their humanity (expressions of freedom).

In Paulo Freire’s scathing critique,

And there I had my answer to why I felt so repulsed by other teachers. If one truly believes in the humanity of students, in the power of education to guide them to freedom, then the current education system is one is truly profane, in its embrace of death, and rejection of life.

My goal in writing this is not to berate the education system and its practitioners that hypocritically further its existence while claiming to care for the wellbeing of students. It is to direct attention to a different way of teaching. If “perception is everything,” then the way we teach reflects our life philosophy. Though I am saddened by the fact that this reveals many unfortunate things about the perceptions of others, I am also emboldened to commit to my teaching style. Following this realisation, many quirks of my teaching made much more sense. It is why I seek to earn engagement from my students. They should be treated as humans with free will, and I speak to them respectfully to get them to agree to listen in class. It is why when students break off into conversation, I am open to creating opportunities for organic discussions, while having to precariously balance keeping the classroom on a steady-enough path to complete the lesson outcomes. When a concept is not immediately absorbed, but devolves into confusion and frantic questioning, the chaos is the learning experience itself. Knowledge is not static, and is constantly being transformed as it becomes internalised by the student. The fact that it is happening in such a visible way in the classroom is to be celebrated, because the alternative is that it was never properly understood by the student.  

I now have a better answer when asked about what makes the Atlas classroom different, as opposed to incomplete facets such as “the kids seem to be happy and want to be here.” The Atlas classroom is the outcome when a teacher believes in their mission to humanise students, and the teaching methods that arise from that perception, is a pedagogy of freedom.