TRANSMITTING LIFE:

Revisioning Professionalism in Teaching

by Orin Domenico

 

 

Preface:

 

As I completed this third [Note: the first essay, "Revisioning Discipline," appeared in the winter issue of SKOLE - the second will appear in the spring issue of the JFL, ed.] in a continuing series of essays on educational reform, I felt the need to say a few things directly to readers about the writing style that I see evolving in these pages. That style, I can now see, is closely related to content.

 

First, I am aware that these essays are heavy on abstract ideas and light on practical suggestions. I am more interested in the ideas that guide our decisions than I am in just how a classroom or class should look or run. Ideas are far more powerful and influential than we often realize. The futility of so many of our reform efforts comes from the fact that we tinker with classroom procedures without changing the underlying (driving) assumptions. A set of reductive ideas has produced our current social and educational reality, and only a new set of ideas will change it. Furthermore, what I am suggesting is a movement away from from mechanistic and reproducible approaches, toward a recognition of education as something idiosyncratic and essentially mysterious. My ap-proach is anti-pedagogical and anti-curricular.

 

Second, my allusions and references are predominantly to poets and vision-aries rather than to educational philosophers and reformers, to Rumi, Blake, and Whitman, rather than to Dewey and Whitehead. I could see some readers characterizing my ideas as Liberal or New-Agey, but I think of my principles as be-ing essentially conservative. I am interested in the restoration of Soul and Imagination to education. These are ancient ideas, deeply embedded in our tra-dition, which are being discarded and lost in this brave new reductive world. To restore vision and imagination, we must be visionary and imaginative. I don't worry much about being reasonable and pragmatic, for we have allowed ourselves to be shackled for too long by an over-reliance on reason and pragmatism.

 

Finally, I confess to a tendency to set out more ideas than I am able to ade-quately develop in a given piece. I am particularly prone to do this near the end of any given essay. Rather than cut these, I admit their presence and take them as starting points for new ventures.

 

And if, as we work we can transmit life into our work,

life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready

and we ripple with life through the days.

 

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,

if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding,

good is the stool,

content is the woman with fresh life rippling in to her,

content is the man.

 

Give and it shall be given unto you

is still the truth about life.

But giving life is not so easy.

It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up.

 

It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,

even if its only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief. (105)

 

&emdash;from "We Are Transmitters" D.H. Lawrence

 

I work as a teacher. When I say that out in public I have a tendency to recoil into a defensive posture as I'm forming the words. Teachers, as a group, are under attack from all sides, and our response both as individ-uals and as a group is often to get defensive. I see this defensiveness in the letters that teachers write to our local paper in response to regular attacks from citizens who are outraged at their rising school taxes, at "soaring" teachers' salaries, and falling student test scores. Since in other areas of my life, marriage, family and friendship I have found defensiveness to be a most counterproductive reaction to criticism, I cannot believe it will prove effective in resolving the deepening conflict that we teachers find ourselves at the center of reaction (usually knee-jerk) to a perceived attack. I say not a response because response suggests that we have listened to the other, have taken in and re-flected on their words before answering. (The Latin root is spondere, to promise or pledge; so, in a sense, to respond implies a certain keeping of faith with the other.) I say "perceived attack" because, since we haven't really listened, what the other has said often proves not to be a direct at-tack on us at all.

 

Secondly, defensiveness is usually indicative of the fact that the other has struck a nerve; we may feel guilty because we know there is some truth in what they have said, truth that we have no desire to look at. Finally, defensiveness may also be symptomatic of our inability to face the anger of others. In America, where so few of us have dealt with our own anger, it is often very difficult for us to allow others to have theirs, especially when we feel it directed toward us.

 

I began this essay with the intent to first look briefly at the full range of monetary and job tenure issues, that tend to dominate this debate, as a prelude to what I really wanted to talk about. But with our education system in full-blown crisis, whether or not teachers get paid too much or even how they keep their jobs or lose them, are important matters, but not main issues. (For the record, I do not hold typical teacher's positions on these matters. I oppose the tenure system as it is currently set up, and I believe that teachers have made a major mistake in allowing their unions to be little more than self-serving bargaining units fighting for salary increases and maintenance of benefits and the tenure system instead of leading the fight to save our children from the abuses of the oppressive compulsory school system.)

 

The crisis in education is not occurring in a vacuum; it is part of the crisis of family life, the crisis of community life, the crisis of our economy and government as we slip away from democracy toward corporate oligarchy. We cannot discuss education in a meaningful way without considering its part in the brave new world that is being created. We need to reconsider what we are educating our children for: the purpose of education. We need to ask again, what really matters? Teachers need to do some serious thinking about what masters they want to serve.

 

As an English teacher and poet, one of the things that I love to do is to play with words, to inspect them and dissect them, to roll them deli-ciously on my tongue, to savor their onomatopoeic splendor, to pull them apart, implode and explode them, uncover their roots and the connotative baggage they carry. Such word play was the natal impulse of this es-say. The word "professional" is at the heart of the rather silly debate about teaching that goes on nearly continually in the letters to the editor column in our local paper.

 

The critics contend that it is ridiculous to call teachers professionals in the same sense that we use the word to describe doctors and lawyers, who go through long and rigorous training to receive certification. Teachers react defensively and desperately try to make the case that their certification process is indeed comparable. They have to do unpaid stu-dent teaching which is "comparable" to a doctor's internship. They have to take the National Teacher's Exam (NTE) which is "commensurate to a bar exam." They have to earn a Masters degree within five years of be-ginning teaching, and they have to "earn" tenure through a three-year probationary period of "grueling close observation and supervision."

Furthermore, a recent letter claims, "most teaching professionals continue their education beyond the degrees/certification and tenure. Their invaluable time and money is spent to remain current with the new teaching standards and technology." Aside from the humor of anyone wanting to voluntarily "jump in bed" with doctors and lawyers these days, the contention of equivalency is ludicrous.

 

First of all, education courses are for the most part both notoriously easy and a notorious waste of time. (It is no coincidence that many college jocks are education majors.) The time and money spent on teacher training, in most cases, would be much more wisely spent on more thorough preparation, including real-world practice, in one's subject area and on long-term therapy to free teachers from unconscious impulses from their own childhoods, before they begin inflicting them on children.

 

Secondly, the NTE is a cinch. Anyone with a reasonable liberal arts education should be able to pass it easily. I had taken no courses in education history or law and used common sense to guess my way through the professional knowledge segment of the exam. If an exam could do anything to stem the tide of mediocrity in teaching this one certainly wouldn't be the instrument needed.

 

Thirdly, the granting of tenure has nothing to do with teaching ability. Teachers are for the most part not observed all that closely during their probationary period because what they are actually being evaluated for is very easy to see: can they control their students, do they maintain order? I don't have any statistics, but years of observation have shown me that tenure is never denied for lack of knowledge or real interest in your subject area or for incompetent teaching. The only reasons I have seen tenure denied are for failure to control classes and obvious emotional imbalance.

 

Finally, the idea of teachers staying "current" almost always means keeping up with new teaching lingo, the sort of doublespeak that proliferates in all bureaucracies. Most of the course work that practicing teachers go through is in education, usually in pursuit of administrative certification. Courses and workshops offered through teachers' centers and BOCES focus on classroom methodology, discipline, student evaluation, and the use of new technologies. These are courses that buy into the teaching game, rather than question the ways our schools and classes are set up or the basic educational assumptions that we practice under. Very few working teachers continue to take rigorous courses in their subject area or continue to read or practice in it either.

 

Before I go on, I need to say that it is not my intent here to crucify individual teachers. I know many dedicated teachers who work very, very hard and who really care about their students. Most people go into teaching with noble intentions - but good intentions are not enough. We are working in a system that is inflicting severe damage on American children and on what is left of our democracy, and we must take some responsibility for changing (or if necessary destroying) that system. With that in mind I propose a new way of looking at ourselves as professionals.

 

When teachers call themselves "professionals" they are using the word in the sense that is used to describe practitioners of an occupation requir-ing extensive education, not in the more limited sense that describes any-one who is engaged in an activity to gain a livelihood. In teaching circles you will often hear talk of wanting "to be treated like professionals," or of maintaining "a professional attitude." Quite frankly, I find most of this talk rather pretentious; to want to be treated with respect is one thing; to expect an unearned deference another. What do we gain from calling ourselves professionals? We are, I guess, differentiating and distancing ourselves from non-professional teachers - those who have no formal training in the profession. However, a strong case can be made for the notion that teaching requires no special training, only expertise in a field of knowledge and a desire to share it with others.

 

Interestingly, the higher one goes in academia, the more the emphasis shifts from teacher preparation (training) to higher degrees and accomplishments in one's field as qualification to teach. Great universities, par-ticularly in the arts, will hire teachers who have no degrees if they are sufficiently accomplished in their field of endeavor. (I have a friend, a high school dropout, who teaches jazz piano at the three most prestigious colleges in our area.)

 

Throughout history to the present moment we have a marvelous record of learning and accomplishment in all fields that has gone on quite independently of professional teaching. Study the lives of the great achievers in any field of endeavor and you will find a record of self-education (autodidactism), apprenticeship, mentorship and - primarily - of passion and self-discipline. In fact, a pretty strong case can be made that the training of professional teachers and the simultaneous rise of compulsory schooling in the United States have brought about the destruction of what was a very effective democratic education "system." (John Taylor Gatto seems to be engaged in making that case quite well in his forthcoming bookThe Empty Child [Note: Now revised and published asThe Underground History of American Education]).

 

I would suggest that the idea of the professional teacher - the idea that we can, indeed must, train people to teach - is so transparently false that even we teachers are actually quite uncomfortable with calling ourselves professionals. We know, if we are honest with ourselves, that what we learned in teacher training is irrelevant, that what we know about teaching, if we know anything, we have picked up in practice. We look around us and see that some few of our colleagues teach quite well and that most of them are quite mediocre (we already knew this as students) and that the differences among them have nothing to do with anything learned in teacher education. So the appellation "professional" becomes little more than a justification for special treatment, like tenure and the step system of regular promotion and raises. Hence the defensiveness and discomfort I spoke of above.

 

But, before we abandon the term "professional" let us see if it might still prove useful if we consider it from a different perspective. According to etymologist Eric Partridge, our modern English word "profess" is a back-formation from the Middle English word "professed" which meant "bound by a religious vow." The older Latin roots of the word are in the verb "profiteri, to declare." Profiteri is formed from the prefix "pro," meaning "before," and the verb "fateri" meaning "to admit" or "confess." A profession was then a public declaration or confession, a professor "a (public) teacher."

 

What I am suggesting is that we make the taking up of the profession of teaching something akin to the taking or professing of religious vows. I personally find this idea of professing useful in two very distinct ways: first in relation to our chosen discipline (e.g. English, math, science, history) and second in relation to the work we do with children. But before I develop either notion, I need to say a little about the assumptions about work that I bring to this paper. When I talk about work, I am speaking in the older sense of "life's work," or vocation (calling) - that which we were "put" on earth to do - not in the contemporary sense of work as job or career, a tiresome but necessary burden that one must endure as some punishment for the original sin of being born human. I believe, as Freud did, that what we must do to be happy, well-adjusted adults is to find real work and real love. I believe, as James Hillman does, that it is more useful to speak of a work "instinct" rather than a work ethic. The latter implies that we readily take up the burden (or punishment) of work, the former that our hands need real work to do.

 

I believe still, as I professed many years ago in my catechism class, that I was created to "know, love, and serve God in this world," and that I serve God by using the gifts that God gave me to serve the communities (the Sacred Hoops, as Ogalala Sioux shaman Black Elk called them) that I am a part of. Real work is always creative, makes us co-creators, participants in the ongoing creation or evolution of the Universe. Real work is transformative - transforming both the worker and the world. We face the broken world and humbly seek to do God's will for us in it. This may sound simple-minded to those who do not know that the invitation to "follow me" is not an invitation to a life of ease. Following God's will requires a fierceness; doing real work in the broken world will, no doubt, stir things up and may very well get us in trouble. This is the perspective I bring to the discussion of the work of teaching and to this revisioning of professionalism.

 

Profession to Discipline:

 

But tell me, can you do the Good Work

without a teacher? Can you even know what it is

without the Presence of a Master? Notice how

the lowest livelihood requires some instruction.

 

First comes knowledge, then the doing of the job.

And much later, perhaps after you're dead,

something grows from what you've done.

 

Look for help and guidance in whatever craft

you're learning. Look for a generous teacher,

one who has absorbed the tradition he's in. (69)

 

--Rumi

 

The first suggestion that I would make toward the revisioning of professionalism in teaching is that before we ever come to consideration of teaching we need to profess to our discipline. We cannot be the "generous teacher" that Rumi speaks of until we have "absorbed the tradition" of our particular "craft." This profession needs to be a commitment, a giving of ourselves that is akin to marriage or religious vows. In a world which has surrendered to moral tepidity and occupational lukewarmness, our ardor (from the Latin ardere, "to burn") and fervor (from the Latin ferere, "to boil") are desperately needed. We can, as I have said elsewhere, only teach what we ourselves practice, what we ourselves are. Art teachers need to paint and sculpt; music teachers to play and compose. English teachers need to write and to continually immerse themselves in Literature. History teachers need to be practicing historians, math teachers practicing mathematicians. It is not enough to have once studied a discipline as an undergraduate or graduate student. Such study does not constitute an initiation into a discipline.

 

We must become practicing disciples, initiates seeking mastery in our chosen field. To chose a field in this sense is an act of love, a committing of our lives to a purpose, to a path toward truth (from the Icelandic tryggth, "faith"). D. H. Lawrence said that the difference between a boy and a man is that a man has purpose. To take on any discipline seriously is a path to real adulthood (a rare commodity in our adolescent society), for such practice demands self discipline, acceptance of personal mortality and a letting go of childish perfectionism and self pity.

 

One clear implication of this approach to profession is that we would not have young people choosing teaching as a primary career. The movement to teaching, at least on the secondary level, would come only after one had already achieved some success in one's chosen discipline. (I am reminded of C. G. Jung's Institute in Zurich, where Jung would only accept individuals to study to be Jungian therapists who had already successfully pursued another career. I presume that Jung understood that therapists, like teachers, need the deepening that the practice of a discipline brings.)

 

Another implication of this taking up of discipline is that we need to reconsider how teachers are expected to spend their time. I would suggest that the practicing of one's discipline is not only a legitimate use of a teacher's in-school time but also a necessary one. First, as any real disciple knows, practice is not optional; we wither, dry out, fade if we stop. The poet William Stafford said that he would give up everything he had written for the next one; that is the only attitude for artists to have, and we must all be artists if we would teach. Secondly, our students need to see us at our practice, need to witness our struggles and our passion, need to stand close to the fire.*

 

We need to invite them to practice alongside of us with the risk that they might at times outstrip us. They need also to see us being scholars, researching and studying what we love. The Jewish-American writer Anzia Yezierka tells of how in the old country the people understood the necessity to the community of supporting the Rabbinical class that spent all of its time studying the Talmud or the mysteries of the Cabala, but that in America the tradition was quickly lost as the scholar-Rabbis were soon regarded as men too lazy to work for a living. We are in dire need of a return to the old ways. How can we teach scholarship if we do not actively practice it?

 

School as it is presently set up does not allow for disciplined practice or scholarship. I cannot legitimately work at these essays or my poetry or my research at school and even if I could, there would be no time for it. I am expected to keep myself and my students constantly busy. I realized after a year or two of teaching that grades were our real product. We are kept busy producing grades, quizzing and testing, ranking our students, and providing ample evidence to justify the outcomes. Our other pressing, time-consuming business is control. We spend much of our time at various control missions: attendance, detention, study halls, lunch duty, etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum. I would suggest that the practice of our disciplines is much more important, and would prove a more fruitful, use of our time. Teachers' unions might take up the fight for real freeing up of school time, something way beyond the current move to block scheduling.

 

Profession to Children

 

In his prophetic book, The Sibling Society, Robert Bly asks us to open our eyes to the plight of the children of America. We have left them to raise themselves in a moral wasteland. We have abandoned them to the predations of the insatiable monster that is our corporate culture of consumerism, a beast that feeds on the souls of children. Instead of protecting them from the monster, we turn them over to public schools that currently serve as little more than cages where they are fattened for the kill. (This last idea is mine, not Bly's.) Bly describes this abandonment of children again in his poem, "Anger Against Children":

 

Parents take their children into the deepest Oregon forests,

And leave them there. When the children

Open the lunchbox, there are stones inside, and a note saying, "Do Your Own thing."

And what would the children do if they found their way home in the moonlight?

The planes have already landed on Maui, the parents are on vacation.

Our children live in fear at school and in the house.

The mother and father do not protect the younger child from the savagery of the others.

Parents don't want to face the children's rage,

Because the parents are also in rage. (58)

 

We may have entered teaching with a deep desire to work with and help children, but whatever our good intentions we will be agents of the anger Bly writes of, if we work unconsciously in the public schools. We can no longer afford to naively accept the system's assurances that everything we do there is being done for the good of the kids. Alice Miller, the German psychoanalyst, who has written extensively about the violence done to children by Western child-rearing practices, says that we, as adults, will continue to inflict our unconscious rage on children until we see clearly what was done to us in our own childhoods. We teachers, who work closely with children every day, must be awake to our own wounds and must open our eyes to what we are doing.

 

Those that have begun this awakening know that it is a long and at times painful process. We know also that the path is a difficult one to stay on and that we need help along the way. The aid of a therapist who has been down the path before us is invaluable. I would suggest that another valuable aid in this healing movement toward what we might call wholeness is the making of deep and lasting commitments like marriage. Holding faithfully to such commitments helps to keep us honest with our-selves, brings us continually back to those broken and rent parts of ourselves that most need healing.

 

The English verb "commit" comes from the Latin verb committere, "to send, hence, put together, hence, to entrust to, hence also, to undertake, to risk." If children are to be entrusted to us as teachers, then we must make a deep commitment to them and to their welfare, and this commitment is, as all real commitments are, risky. So I am suggesting that the second sense in which we teachers might call ourselves professional is in our profession - binding as if by religious vows - to children. This means we must make real the currently empty platitude that "children come first" in our schools.

 

We can no longer be committed first to protecting our careers and the system we work for by playing it safe, by not telling the truth, by closing our eyes and ears to the inadequacy and abuse that continually surrounds us. A teacher that I know told me recently that he loved teaching and wanted to be the first $100,000 teacher in his district. Now we may or we may not find this statement outrageous, but don't we teachers belong to unions that act as if the continual advancement of our salaries is the most important issue in education? The primary business of our unions, as they currently operate, has been to protect our financial well-being, and in the interest of that protection we have allowed them to propagate, in our names, the transparent fallacy that more money is always the key to better education. I recently visited the Albany Free School, a small private school in the heart of the city that has operated for nearly thirty years now with few monetary resources.

 

Here a group of competent and com-mitted teachers do wonderful work nurturing life in kindergarten through eighth-grade children for $180 per week. I can hear the protests, "No one can live on that kind of money," but I assure you that they, including families, are doing just that, quite comfortably and happily too.

 

They are able to do this because, through their commitment to chil-dren, they have evolved into a life-affirming community. Together they have helped sustain life in a decaying urban neighborhood that was being allowed to die. Together they have found ways to solve the problems of living in our materialistic, money-mad culture, without compromising their values. This is essential because you can only teach (transmit) to children those values which you embody. I am reminded of the radical education professors at my prestigious grad school who preached education as a path to social change, who had us read Illich and Freire, but who fully embraced an upper-middle-class lifestyle. This approach to social trans-formation doesn't work; if education is going to transform society, then it must begin with educators transforming themselves and the schools they work in. If we would teach democracy, then our schools must be democratic. If we want to teach values other than blind consumerism, we must live them. Although I am not prescribing vows of poverty, we can no longer put money first.

 

To put children first means that we can no longer participate unwittingly in the discarding of their souls, which is what we do when we support the current system of schooling that is fixated on extrinsic concerns and that treats children as future cogs in an economic machine rather than as ensouled individuals and members of a sacred community. We have allowed our economic system to serve the interests of profit-takers rather than the interests of the community, and we have allowed our education system to become the servant of that economic system. (To those who object, saying that the corporate world is not getting the skilled workers they need out of the education system, I would suggest that they are getting what they need: passive, docile, ignorant, tractable, apathetic con-sumers, which the current system excels at producing.) To put children first will require a radical re-balancing of our educational priorities with a recognition that the needs of the soul must be addressed. In order to do this, we have to remember, as the Sufi poet Rumi tells us, that "there are two kinds of intelligence." (36)

 

Our school systems, to the extent that they educate at all, have been solely focused on the first kind of intelligence, the "one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says." (36) Rumi tells us that, "with such intelligence you rise in the world. / You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information." (36) This kind of learning, which flows from "outside to inside," he calls "plumbing-learning." Our schools are exclusively concerned with plumbing-learning and with the ranking of children according to its dictates. We unashamedly treat children as if our only concern with them is determining which available slot they will fill in our economic future. We have people called "guidance counselors," whose business is to direct children, like so many electrons, down the appropriate career conduits - this one to the Ivy League, this one to the state college system, this one to tech training, this one to welfare. We discuss the success or failure of our schools in terms of how successful they are at getting kids into college, at preparing them for their economic futures. We totally ignore the second kind of intelligence, and in doing so betray the fact that we are not focused on or concerned with children at all - for to deny them their souls is to deny them their humanity.

 

The second kind of intelligence Rumi writes of is soul intelligence, "one already completed and preserved inside you. / A spring overflowing its springbox. / A freshness in the center of the chest...a fountainhead from within you, moving out." (36) This description would suggest that we cannot develop a curriculum to educate for soul intelligence, that to allow for it will require a sea-change reformation of schools far more dramatic than the endless tinkering with curricular and pedagogical concerns that currently passes for school reform. The directions this reformation might take are outside of the scope of this current essay, but it is apparent that to truly put children first will require a bold defiance of the economic imperatives that drive the entire system. It cannot be done by teachers who have sold their own souls in the service of the same imperatives. I believe that we have little choice but to change, for our present path is the road to the victory of death over life. A society that allows the souls of its children to be destroyed cannot long endure, and ours, which is plummeting toward death now, seems determined to take the whole world down with it. So, in a sense, the commitments I am calling us to make are com-mitments to life.

 

To teach is to show or guide the way to life. Our duty in relation to our tradition and to our students is, as the poet Stephen Spender wrote, "Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother / With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit." Our "lovely ambition" must be that our "lips, still touched with fire, / Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song." A big step toward reclaiming our own spirit and becoming transmitters of life might be the making of deep commitments or professions to our disciplines and to our students. Then, we might be truly proud to call ourselves professionals.

 

Works Cited

 

Bly, Robert. Mediations on the Insatiable Soul. New York: Harper, 1994.

Lawrence, D.H. Selected Poems. New York: Viking, 1962.

Rumi. This Longing: Poetry, Teaching Stories, and Letters of. Trans. Coleman Barks and John Moyne. Putney, Vermont: Threshold, 1988.

 

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