On Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul
It’s easy to underestimate the difference, positive or negative, that we make in the lives of those who depend on us, and easy to ignore how much more and positive difference we could make by respect than by authority. And frankly, as a rule, most teachers, like most parents, are caught up in the daily grind, and thus aren’t able, even when they give it their best, to exercise as much positive influence as they probably like to in their students’ lives.
But lucky for us there are those who prove to be the exception to this rule. Teachers who believe in students the way they need and want to believe in themselves, who encourage them down the paths toward their higher potentials, and who are or were living proof of what a single individual can accomplish when it comes to being pivotal in the life of another toward making the world a better place.
We are truly unique in the extent to which we have the power to transform nature by mind and hand, and we are rightly viewed as dangerous for the potential for wrong use of this enormous power. But it is exactly this, the power to create the world we want, that brings the responsibility to want a world that is as good for everyone who lives in it as it is for us.
We remember these great teachers because they are true guides who helped us to focus the meaning of what we want and need to remember, the truth of what we know in our hearts about what matters, and they help us to remember to choose the path of excellence over the path of least resistance. We have been warned many times, even in the course of preparing this speech, to stick to what is feasible. But it is also important to remember that we don’t know what we can do until we try, and more important, we cannot do anything we don’t try to do. It’s easy to forget that we can’t measure the future on the basis of the past, failing to dream we can simply end up recreating the mistakes of the past. We must first have the dream before we can have a dream come true.
We are unlikely, after all, to simply stumble upon freedom, equality, truth, and justice through the cumbersome momentum of the social machine, mainly because it is not even aimed in the right direction. As we’ve said, these ideals exist as targets, if they exist at all, and as Aristotle long ago noted, there are many ways to miss a target, but there is only one way to hit it.
I know it’s easy to be idealistic as a student, and I admit to not knowing all the real-world headaches that come with teaching, I understand that there are real constraints which weigh heavily on individual teachers and prevent the realization of such ideals as either excellence or equality in the classroom. I know the difficulty of maintaining idealism in positions where the so-called real world weighs so heavily.
And yet, because of this pressure to co-opt one’s goals, I also know the importance of resisting this pressure. We do no one, including ourselves, any favors by influencing others, including our students, toward less than their best. It’s certainly easy to get caught up in the mindset of wondering what one person can do that can make any difference anyway. But what does this accomplish but to prevent us from doing what we can? And who are we to complain if we do not even do our own part? We can’t change the whole world without first changing our own part of it. Then we can begin to make a difference to others. Then we begin to teach.
Therefore, I maintain that idealism and optimism are the most realistic and effective ways of teaching. Why? Because they work! No matter how many discouraged, pessimistic, or negative teachers a given student may ultimately have to deal with, it only takes one good teacher to make all the difference in a child’s or young adult’s life, outlook on others, and attitude about learning and working, and even friendship.
This is where every individual makes a difference, not just teachers, but teachers even more than most. When you’re having difficulty believing in how much difference one person really can make, remember that, even as it’s easy to find fault, so it’s easy to look out into the ocean of humanity and focus on those who use their power badly, and thus conclude that we have “evidence” that it’s just “human nature.” We even use this evidence to justify our own selfishness in the name of self-defense. But what is “evident” depends critically upon what one is looking for. For just as there are Hitler’s and Hussains, there are Mandellas and Mother Theresas everywhere you look -- if you look for them. They’re not all famous, but they make a hell of a big difference in the lives of those who do know them. And perhaps they would be more famous if we we’re as good at giving credit as we are at finding fault.
Despite the rhetoric of our era, it doesn’t hurt to care. Some of us have allowed ourselves to become convinced that it does. Insecurity breeds this defensiveness, and we certainly have plenty of reasons to feel insecure in our modern world. But this is no reason for us individually to buy into the lie that it is good to be insensitive to the needs of others and selfish in our own interest. We are not, despite the flavor of history, each others enemies. We are too many and the world is too small to survive this competitive attitude for much longer. Just as learning is its own reward, so insensitivity is its very own punishment. For all the pain we can cause to others in this way, it is we who are hurt first and most by our inability to care.
The belief in human goodness and the advance of human excellence through dialogue has been shared by many ancient and modern educators. Among these were John Taylor Gatto, the New York State Teacher of the Year who resigned after 26 years of award-winning teaching to promote a radical transformation of state schooling,[1] Another is Alexander Mickeljohn, founder of the famed and controversial Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920's,[2] Likewise, Howard Zinn, a historian who has given voice to those who have had no voice by writing and teaching the losers view of history.[3]
Zinn claims that to be a historian is to be a moral philosopher. We must use our knowledge of the past to confront the present, in both our personal and our cultural history. As he learned the meaning of work in a shipyard, the meaning of war and the stupidity of violence as a bomber dropping nepalm on the Vietnamese, and a passion for civil rights and the necessity of nonviolent struggle teaching during and joining in on the students movement of the sixties, he never pretended to be an objective dispassionate professional. Thus, in his book A People's History of the World, he has given us a losers view of history. The point of view of those who have struggled against the dominating forces and against the disproportion of wealth and power is critical to our enlightenment in the new age. People who go without so much of what they need, need a voice. As he makes clear, we must use artistry and drama to intensify history, for the quiet times of history tell more than we give them credit for. Our traditional view of history considers too much drama to be not objective enough, not professional, he says. But objectivity is a common myth, and sometimes quite a harmful one. The "same kind of pretense to neutrality that governments have...like a belief in the neutrality of law...and journalism...just disguise the reality of conflict...and the disproportion of control in the world." "Channels are only mazes in which people are invited to get lost." (from Howard Zinn's 1989 speech at the U. of Wisconsin)
Only a passion for justice and peace can bring the lessons of history to bear upon the problems of our time. The study of history is meaningless if it does not advance the human condition. Traditional perspectives focus the part of reality they want those who hold those perspectives believe to be history, which is clearly a dangerous power. As classicist B.B. Powell points out in his New Appraisal of Classical Myth, due to the fact that stories are frequently told for the entertainment and benefit of the leisure class, there is always the danger of taking the life-styles of propertied aristocrats to represent the lives of all. Zinn claims that historians who feign an unbiased history use a method which is blatantly dishonest. Zinn, like many historians of the new paradigm, prefers the method of honesty to objectivity. We need to know the bias inherent in the search for history, that is, what the author is looking for and cares about. Power does not just come out of the barrel of a gun, but from ordinary people doing what they do in alignment. The study of this aspect of history can bring changes as powerful as the tumultuous changes such power has wrought in history. As Zinn points out, the list of good things humans have done is far longer than the list of bad.
Thus, to answer to Zinn, we undertake to consider this particular line of western history, that is, through the influence of ancient Greece, not because it is the preferred or more important heritage, but because it is the one most relevant to myself and those with similar psychological ancestry. My conditioning--into a family of European extraction, Catholic, educated in the American public and private school system, subject throughout my life to the forces of Capitalist economic practices such as advertising and capital inheritance, and the practices of the democratic political system, which is its own form of advertising--is grounded in this particular line of cultural influence. And Benoit Mandelbrot, whose discoveries promise to change the world – though we have rather successfully resisted this paradigm shift thus far, like so much else that would be good for us.
Mine is one strand through the rope of western culture, itself a strand in some larger rope, an evolution from long past which extends far into the future. Those with different personal histories will have other cultural histories, and it is important for this reason to integrate these differences into our idea of the past, but many of us raised in western culture share these similar cultural roots. And yet, realizing the danger of generalizing the heritage of the majority to that of the unique and special, I am nonetheless best able to see through my own eyes and to speak my own voice.
I myself have been fortunate enough to have had a few such idealistic individuals as my own teachers--true great souls who did not need to die for me to learn from them the valuable lessons that they had to teach; they only needed to give their lives to the ideals that Socrates and so many since have taught, not for it. Idealism is an art, and as such, the idealist does what he or she has to do, whatever they can do, which is not everything, but simply those things that will not get done if one does not do them oneself. There is for everyone such tasks in life, usually unbeknownst to us up until the moment that we undertake them. And it might be argued that this is what we all deserve, what education might have at its heart, i.e. for us to have the chance to find and do our best work, honestly, and without the perversion of extrinsic motivators like grades and economic incentives which seem only to give reason for taking short-cuts from excellence to mediocrity.
There was my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Frye, who taught me--among other things--several especially fruitful, interrelated, and, I think, revolutionary ideas. Firstly, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, a scientific insight which Socrates and Plato clearly anticipated, and one which has never seized to come into play in my practical reasoning since. Secondly, he helped me learn the parallel lesson that a sin is not a sin unless you think it is and do it anyway--a surprising thing for a good Catholic girl to realize especially within the learning structure of a Catholic school, and a point Socrates himself struggled tirelessly to make.[4] Being taught to question such assumptions as those which underlied my religion seemed a radical endeavor to me, even then.
This was a lot to think about at twelve years old, but practically impossible to forget as I grew out into the adult who here travels through the ancient valley of the muses toward the sacred temple of Delphi, contemplating the history of her education. The muses were very concerned about communication.[5]
Thinking about it now, there seems a quality (an attitude, a disposition, or an ideal?) which all great teachers seem to share with Socrates--whether they know it or not--and it involves their knowing how much we all have to learn. Mr. Frye was the first teacher I ever had who asked me, 'What do you think?' rather than saying, 'Here is what to think.' In short, he respected his students as individuals capable of knowing themselves, and in the process, of discovering the truth. It perhaps should not have been, but it seemed a revelation to me then that it matters what I think.
Mr. Frye was not condemned to death for this blatant defiance of the accepted attitude that children are the receivers, not the discoverers, of knowledge, but only to face the scorn of his fellow and senior colleagues. Since the pressure of such peer ridicule had been enough to limit the ideals of most, if not all, of my other elementary teachers, I give this great teacher full credit and thanks for what courage it must have taken to stand by his belief in us. By taking my young mind seriously, and helping me to balance it within the context of my growing body, this idealist taught me to respect myself...and he didn't have to die for me to learn it. What he did have to do was to have the courage to stand up for the truth, that is, to give himself to the most honest ideals of education.
[1]see John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.)
[2]see Things I Want To Remember When I'm the Teacher, a Speech by Juliana Hunt: Fall, 1991.
[3]
[4]In fact, Socrates carried this far enough to support the extreme claim for which he has taken more criticism than any other, i.e. that no one ever sins knowingly, which is to say that, if they truly know it is bad, they simply won't do it. People always act with an eye to their own good, Socrates held, and it is only confusion about what actually is good which causes humans to sin in its name.
[5]Powell, p. 178.
It’s easy to underestimate the difference, positive or negative, that we make in the lives of those who depend on us, and easy to ignore how much more and positive difference we could make by respect than by authority. And frankly, as a rule, most teachers, like most parents, are caught up in the daily grind, and thus aren’t able, even when they give it their best, to exercise as much positive influence as they probably like to in their students’ lives.
But lucky for us there are those who prove to be the exception to this rule. Teachers who believe in students the way they need and want to believe in themselves, who encourage them down the paths toward their higher potentials, and who are or were living proof of what a single individual can accomplish when it comes to being pivotal in the life of another toward making the world a better place.
We are truly unique in the extent to which we have the power to transform nature by mind and hand, and we are rightly viewed as dangerous for the potential for wrong use of this enormous power. But it is exactly this, the power to create the world we want, that brings the responsibility to want a world that is as good for everyone who lives in it as it is for us.
We remember these great teachers because they are true guides who helped us to focus the meaning of what we want and need to remember, the truth of what we know in our hearts about what matters, and they help us to remember to choose the path of excellence over the path of least resistance. We have been warned many times, even in the course of preparing this speech, to stick to what is feasible. But it is also important to remember that we don’t know what we can do until we try, and more important, we cannot do anything we don’t try to do. It’s easy to forget that we can’t measure the future on the basis of the past, failing to dream we can simply end up recreating the mistakes of the past. We must first have the dream before we can have a dream come true.
We are unlikely, after all, to simply stumble upon freedom, equality, truth, and justice through the cumbersome momentum of the social machine, mainly because it is not even aimed in the right direction. As we’ve said, these ideals exist as targets, if they exist at all, and as Aristotle long ago noted, there are many ways to miss a target, but there is only one way to hit it.
I know it’s easy to be idealistic as a student, and I admit to not knowing all the real-world headaches that come with teaching, I understand that there are real constraints which weigh heavily on individual teachers and prevent the realization of such ideals as either excellence or equality in the classroom. I know the difficulty of maintaining idealism in positions where the so-called real world weighs so heavily.
And yet, because of this pressure to co-opt one’s goals, I also know the importance of resisting this pressure. We do no one, including ourselves, any favors by influencing others, including our students, toward less than their best. It’s certainly easy to get caught up in the mindset of wondering what one person can do that can make any difference anyway. But what does this accomplish but to prevent us from doing what we can? And who are we to complain if we do not even do our own part? We can’t change the whole world without first changing our own part of it. Then we can begin to make a difference to others. Then we begin to teach.
Therefore, I maintain that idealism and optimism are the most realistic and effective ways of teaching. Why? Because they work! No matter how many discouraged, pessimistic, or negative teachers a given student may ultimately have to deal with, it only takes one good teacher to make all the difference in a child’s or young adult’s life, outlook on others, and attitude about learning and working, and even friendship.
This is where every individual makes a difference, not just teachers, but teachers even more than most. When you’re having difficulty believing in how much difference one person really can make, remember that, even as it’s easy to find fault, so it’s easy to look out into the ocean of humanity and focus on those who use their power badly, and thus conclude that we have “evidence” that it’s just “human nature.” We even use this evidence to justify our own selfishness in the name of self-defense. But what is “evident” depends critically upon what one is looking for. For just as there are Hitler’s and Hussains, there are Mandellas and Mother Theresas everywhere you look -- if you look for them. They’re not all famous, but they make a hell of a big difference in the lives of those who do know them. And perhaps they would be more famous if we we’re as good at giving credit as we are at finding fault.
Despite the rhetoric of our era, it doesn’t hurt to care. Some of us have allowed ourselves to become convinced that it does. Insecurity breeds this defensiveness, and we certainly have plenty of reasons to feel insecure in our modern world. But this is no reason for us individually to buy into the lie that it is good to be insensitive to the needs of others and selfish in our own interest. We are not, despite the flavor of history, each others enemies. We are too many and the world is too small to survive this competitive attitude for much longer. Just as learning is its own reward, so insensitivity is its very own punishment. For all the pain we can cause to others in this way, it is we who are hurt first and most by our inability to care.
The belief in human goodness and the advance of human excellence through dialogue has been shared by many ancient and modern educators. Among these were John Taylor Gatto, the New York State Teacher of the Year who resigned after 26 years of award-winning teaching to promote a radical transformation of state schooling,[1] Another is Alexander Mickeljohn, founder of the famed and controversial Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920's,[2] Likewise, Howard Zinn, a historian who has given voice to those who have had no voice by writing and teaching the losers view of history.[3]
Zinn claims that to be a historian is to be a moral philosopher. We must use our knowledge of the past to confront the present, in both our personal and our cultural history. As he learned the meaning of work in a shipyard, the meaning of war and the stupidity of violence as a bomber dropping nepalm on the Vietnamese, and a passion for civil rights and the necessity of nonviolent struggle teaching during and joining in on the students movement of the sixties, he never pretended to be an objective dispassionate professional. Thus, in his book A People's History of the World, he has given us a losers view of history. The point of view of those who have struggled against the dominating forces and against the disproportion of wealth and power is critical to our enlightenment in the new age. People who go without so much of what they need, need a voice. As he makes clear, we must use artistry and drama to intensify history, for the quiet times of history tell more than we give them credit for. Our traditional view of history considers too much drama to be not objective enough, not professional, he says. But objectivity is a common myth, and sometimes quite a harmful one. The "same kind of pretense to neutrality that governments have...like a belief in the neutrality of law...and journalism...just disguise the reality of conflict...and the disproportion of control in the world." "Channels are only mazes in which people are invited to get lost." (from Howard Zinn's 1989 speech at the U. of Wisconsin)
Only a passion for justice and peace can bring the lessons of history to bear upon the problems of our time. The study of history is meaningless if it does not advance the human condition. Traditional perspectives focus the part of reality they want those who hold those perspectives believe to be history, which is clearly a dangerous power. As classicist B.B. Powell points out in his New Appraisal of Classical Myth, due to the fact that stories are frequently told for the entertainment and benefit of the leisure class, there is always the danger of taking the life-styles of propertied aristocrats to represent the lives of all. Zinn claims that historians who feign an unbiased history use a method which is blatantly dishonest. Zinn, like many historians of the new paradigm, prefers the method of honesty to objectivity. We need to know the bias inherent in the search for history, that is, what the author is looking for and cares about. Power does not just come out of the barrel of a gun, but from ordinary people doing what they do in alignment. The study of this aspect of history can bring changes as powerful as the tumultuous changes such power has wrought in history. As Zinn points out, the list of good things humans have done is far longer than the list of bad.
Thus, to answer to Zinn, we undertake to consider this particular line of western history, that is, through the influence of ancient Greece, not because it is the preferred or more important heritage, but because it is the one most relevant to myself and those with similar psychological ancestry. My conditioning--into a family of European extraction, Catholic, educated in the American public and private school system, subject throughout my life to the forces of Capitalist economic practices such as advertising and capital inheritance, and the practices of the democratic political system, which is its own form of advertising--is grounded in this particular line of cultural influence. And Benoit Mandelbrot, whose discoveries promise to change the world – though we have rather successfully resisted this paradigm shift thus far, like so much else that would be good for us.
Mine is one strand through the rope of western culture, itself a strand in some larger rope, an evolution from long past which extends far into the future. Those with different personal histories will have other cultural histories, and it is important for this reason to integrate these differences into our idea of the past, but many of us raised in western culture share these similar cultural roots. And yet, realizing the danger of generalizing the heritage of the majority to that of the unique and special, I am nonetheless best able to see through my own eyes and to speak my own voice.
I myself have been fortunate enough to have had a few such idealistic individuals as my own teachers--true great souls who did not need to die for me to learn from them the valuable lessons that they had to teach; they only needed to give their lives to the ideals that Socrates and so many since have taught, not for it. Idealism is an art, and as such, the idealist does what he or she has to do, whatever they can do, which is not everything, but simply those things that will not get done if one does not do them oneself. There is for everyone such tasks in life, usually unbeknownst to us up until the moment that we undertake them. And it might be argued that this is what we all deserve, what education might have at its heart, i.e. for us to have the chance to find and do our best work, honestly, and without the perversion of extrinsic motivators like grades and economic incentives which seem only to give reason for taking short-cuts from excellence to mediocrity.
There was my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Frye, who taught me--among other things--several especially fruitful, interrelated, and, I think, revolutionary ideas. Firstly, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, a scientific insight which Socrates and Plato clearly anticipated, and one which has never seized to come into play in my practical reasoning since. Secondly, he helped me learn the parallel lesson that a sin is not a sin unless you think it is and do it anyway--a surprising thing for a good Catholic girl to realize especially within the learning structure of a Catholic school, and a point Socrates himself struggled tirelessly to make.[4] Being taught to question such assumptions as those which underlied my religion seemed a radical endeavor to me, even then.
This was a lot to think about at twelve years old, but practically impossible to forget as I grew out into the adult who here travels through the ancient valley of the muses toward the sacred temple of Delphi, contemplating the history of her education. The muses were very concerned about communication.[5]
Thinking about it now, there seems a quality (an attitude, a disposition, or an ideal?) which all great teachers seem to share with Socrates--whether they know it or not--and it involves their knowing how much we all have to learn. Mr. Frye was the first teacher I ever had who asked me, 'What do you think?' rather than saying, 'Here is what to think.' In short, he respected his students as individuals capable of knowing themselves, and in the process, of discovering the truth. It perhaps should not have been, but it seemed a revelation to me then that it matters what I think.
Mr. Frye was not condemned to death for this blatant defiance of the accepted attitude that children are the receivers, not the discoverers, of knowledge, but only to face the scorn of his fellow and senior colleagues. Since the pressure of such peer ridicule had been enough to limit the ideals of most, if not all, of my other elementary teachers, I give this great teacher full credit and thanks for what courage it must have taken to stand by his belief in us. By taking my young mind seriously, and helping me to balance it within the context of my growing body, this idealist taught me to respect myself...and he didn't have to die for me to learn it. What he did have to do was to have the courage to stand up for the truth, that is, to give himself to the most honest ideals of education.
[1]see John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.)
[2]see Things I Want To Remember When I'm the Teacher, a Speech by Juliana Hunt: Fall, 1991.
[3]
[4]In fact, Socrates carried this far enough to support the extreme claim for which he has taken more criticism than any other, i.e. that no one ever sins knowingly, which is to say that, if they truly know it is bad, they simply won't do it. People always act with an eye to their own good, Socrates held, and it is only confusion about what actually is good which causes humans to sin in its name.
[5]Powell, p. 178.