The teachers pay the same attention to three-year-olds as they do to black belts. When the students are taken through moves or stances or full routines (katas) that they’ve done thousands of times, there is always something to learn. Noam Chomsky was once asked on cbc-tv if he ever got tired repeating the same points about politics year after year. He chuckled, adjusted a pesky earpiece, and said, “No, after we finish this interview, I’m going into a linguistics seminar where we’ll discuss issues I’ve been thinking about a lot longer. There’s always something to learn.”
Teaching is one of the most basic human activities, like breathing and seeing. There’s no end to it, just deeper depths. The best part about watching Gideon’s karate teachers is that I can’t nail down why they are so effective. It’s fun, I think, but there’s more to it than that. Or: they like kids. But the nub keeps slipping away. That’s why it’s teaching, a kind of activity that exists in the doing and that constantly reshapes according to context. This doesn’t mean that method doesn’t matter. But there is always that other, independent variable: the relationship between teacher and student.
It is like the mystery of therapy. Teaching and therapy are the two remaining institutional redoubts of the oral tradition in our society. Aside from them, the oral tradition survives mainly in gossip, chit-chat, and folklore. Aside from teaching and therapy, the written rules. No one has yet succeeded in reducing teaching or therapy to written form, despite correspondence courses and self-help books. It doesn’t even require speech; silence can be the best teacher. Some of the most famed cases involve the sage or therapist saying nothing at a crucial moment.
Pedagogy is unavoidable, as is a curriculum. But it is in the nature of oral discourse that it cannot have definitive rules or a stable end point. You can offer these provisionally but there is no authoritative method or conclusion, any more than there is in a friendship, a marriage, or therapy. The relationship can stray somewhere unexpected; it can stop or unfold further. Teaching is essentially open-ended, because it belongs among those normal human activities that are embedded in time, and can’t be extracted from their unfolding process and formalized. It is in their nature that any human being can do them and in some form, everyone does.
In this light — that teaching is a normal human function — I’d like to make a modest proposal: why not extend teaching duty, in an assistant capacity, to members of the community in order to help solve the classroom crisis everyone talks about? To the extent that schools require extra help in the classroom, citizens would be called on to serve, as they are in jury duty, with similar allowances for being excused and/or omitted. These community members would help so that teachers themselves could spend more time with individual students, as in Montessori classrooms. This would address the problems of class size and also of discipline. Let me linger over discipline.
It is impossible to run a teaching institution, or any institution, without some element of order and mutual respect. Reports in the spring from C. W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute in Toronto, where a fatal shooting occurred, and from elsewhere, tell of students threatening teachers, ignoring them, verbally and physically abusing them. This is not just an education issue, it is a sign of serious social breakdown.
In the past, order was generally maintained through a social fabric that was hierarchical and patriarchal. It included religion, a moral code, parental authority, and sanctions like the threat of hell, all of it internalized in a sense of guilt and shame over violations. It worked in the sense that it largely kept the lid on violent impulses or channelled them elsewhere, but the human and emotional costs were monstrous. People were dulled to their own experiences and each other. I would not want to restore this set of constraints if we could, and we can’t. Particular players — parents, schools, teachers, courts, governments — can try to impose controls and limits, but they will not be nearly as effective as they were within a total framework that no longer exists. The issue now is: can our society devise a set of social controls that permits learning but does not require severe repression and an impossible return to the undesirable framework of earlier eras?
Of what use would the conscription of classroom citizen assistants be in this respect? One of the serious causes of the breakdown is that many youth believe their surrounding society doesn’t really give a damn, and does little to ease their way through school and beyond. Their job prospects are uncertain, and they are told to prepare for constant change. This amounts to saying, “You’re on your own.” The models they see for success in the adult world tend to be grandiose and egocentric, and lack social purpose or contribution. The presence of community members in classrooms would offset their sense that society doesn’t care, because it would represent a social commitment, in personal form. (My Uncle Eddie, a cosmetic surgeon, used to go into British Columbia prisons to operate on inmates who felt a different look might help them change. The results were good, and the warden said that this was mostly because the convicts knew Eddie wanted to be there.) Today, adult society appears to have largely opted out of its responsibilities to coming generations. Youth get this and respond variously, from violence to sullenness. A way for adults to address this response would be to opt back in.
Besides, I don’t think teaching should be a full-time activity. It is too demanding and too normal. Teaching a two-hour university class is exhausting. What can it mean to teach a room full of kids, all day, five days a week? Summers off don’t solve the problem. The kids teem back in September. Teachers should teach only part-time because teaching, like eating, is a part-time activity. Then they could teach at their best. Since this may have to await a more utopian future, the least the rest of us can do for now is to get in there and share the burden, as well as the vast reward.
