Teaching, Critical Thinking and Love

Teaching, Critical Thinking and Love
by Harold Jarche | Sun, 11/09/2008 - 13:54

Most schools say that they promote critical thinking and many do, in some way. Critical thinking requires that you constantly question authority, including your own. However many schools concentrate on traditional teaching. Here you get the facts and establish some common understanding. Some go further and help students gain non-teachable insight through less authoritative methods such as play or metaphor. Finally, some teachers prepare students to seek meaningful conversations and develop their own networks for learning. To be a good learner, we must seek out those who might shake our cognitive tree a bit. To find these people, we need a moral or philosphical framework from which to decide who we seek to converse with. Schools and good teachers can help students build this framework.

In Love on Campus, William Deresiewicz discusses the erotic intensity between professors and students, in what he calls brain sex, or non-physical love. Having been bathed in our cultural surround, it is up to teachers to help students break free from the culture and stand on their own.

Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?

Good teaching remains an honourable profession.

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