The vocation of the teacher

The vocation of the teacher
Erik Buys Gent, 30th of October, 2010

I’d like to sketch out three of the challenges teachers, and teachers of religion in particular, are faced with today.
The first challenge lies in trying to establish a relationship between teacher and students that is based on trust. Certainly in today’s context this challenge is not to be taken lightly. The recent tragedy in the Catholic Church, concerning the horrifying cases of pedophilia, questions the nature of the relationship one should uphold as a teacher or an educator towards the youngsters one is working with. One approach could be to go for a clear and well defined distance between the two. In this case, education can quickly become a one way affair. One way affairs are always suspicious. They are based on the presumption that the teacher knows all. Students are merely seen as empty vessels waiting to be filled with the fountain of knowledge the teacher is willing to provide. In the end, the nature of this kind of relationship can only be defined in terms of dominance, better said the dominance of teacher over students. This is exactly the context wherein pedophiles are able to function at their very worst. If teachers are only viewed as people who dominate their students, then maybe peace in the classroom might be obtained, but that peace also takes a terrible toll. It might mean that students are too afraid to talk to their educators about eventual abuses by other adults. Which is exactly what we fear as educators, parents and teachers. So the intention of trying to establish a clear distance between teacher and students is good, but this approach doesn’t seem to obtain its purpose. On the contrary. We should be able to avoid this pitfall. Another pitfall consists of an approach that is radically opposed to the one I was just talking about. In fear of hurting the child, teachers also might have the tendency to provide the ones they are trying to educate with too great a freedom. A freedom that actually destroys the freedom of being a child. Since freedom comes with responsibility, providing a child with freedom also means charging it with responsibility. Part of the blessing of being a child is exactly being free of some responsibilities. Even our legal system acknowledges this. Freedom should be handed over gradually. If children have to grow up without guiding hands, they are simply abandoned and damaged all the way. Again peace in the classroom might be obtained by this kind of approach, now in the dominance of students over teachers, but this kind of relationship also is but a power play or one way affair.
One way affairs aren’t real relationships. Real relationships begin where one allows himself to be affected by the particularities of the other without trying to erase those particularities in dominance patterns. In order to experience the particularities of the other, one firstly has to acknowledge the particularities of his own personality. This can only be done when one is inspired by trust and not by fear, because acknowledging one’s own personality also means accepting one’s vulnerability. So establishing a relationship of trust as a teacheris founded in the acceptance of your own vulnerability – allowing it without trying to dominate it –, and in the faithful and daring willingness to share this vulnerability with others – namely your students. Sharing with your students what’s close to your heart allows them to do the same.
The mutual (imitative) act of sharing in educational relationships is, in my experience, a necessary condition to tackle yet another challenge for today’s teachers. This second challenge consists of intercultural and interreligious encounters. In sharing relationships truth can be understood as honesty. When I, as a teacher, don’t consider myself as the one who owns knowledge as a means for power, but when I speak to my students from the perspective of personal convictions and dearly held personal interests – be it math, physics, mechanics, cooking, cultural sciences, religion or Latin –, I might trigger their willingness to speak to me from the perspective of what they take very seriously. In this way, teaching becomes an exchange of what people are passionate about. People are passionate about those things they’ve experienced as a great joy in their life. So sharing what you are passionate about eventually becomes an act of love, wherein knowledge of one another is not abused to blackmail one another in a power play. Knowledge as love, moreover, is a profound biblical notion.
Only in sharing relationships, based on mutual trust, can intercultural and interreligious encounters become productive and creative. A couple of years ago I had a wonderful experience in this regard. At one time I noticed that my Muslim students had trouble making a cross sign when I wanted to start a prayer. They made some movement with their hand to their head, but they just couldn’t make a cross sign. They didn’t want to offend me, because during the months we got to know each other they experienced me as a convinced Christian, but at the same time they didn’t want to betray their own faith. Of course I didn’t want them to suffer this moral dilemma any longer and I told them they didn’t have to make a cross sign. They were relieved. In the months that followed they opened up more and more and they started talking about their own religious traditions, at the same time discussing some of the topics I dealt with in my lessons. In the end they told me they wanted to convert me to Islam, and my reply was that I wanted to convert them to Christianity. Neither of us experienced this as a threat or as an attempt that one wanted to dominate the other. I think we both experienced these statements as declarations of love. I know I did. From their clumsy attempts to make a near cross sign I knew they sincerely and profoundly respected me. So I knew that when they told me they wanted to convert me to Islam, I knew they wanted to share with me the greatest gift of their life: their faith. Why should you feel threatened when someone wants to share his most precious gift with you?
Intercultural and interreligious dialogue really becomes a promising and humanizing adventure in the context of mutual trust. Which brings me to a third and final big challenge in teaching and education: the question of ethics. In the end, every teacher should consider himself as a teacher and learner of love, first and foremost, and not as a superior specialist in moral affaires. Only a human being who has been enabled to allow himself to be touched by other human beings in a loving way, grows to be a human being who can make moral choices. To me, it seems very important in education that we as teachers don’t make the moral choices instead of our students. Indeed we can impose a system of fear and pride whereby students are good because they fear hellish punishment or aim for heavenly rewards. But what will happen then if ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ disappear? Will they be able to respect their neighbor out of pure and simple love, a love that is different from and not depending on the love for some social reward? Moral sensibility, being obedient to the cry of your neighbor in need, is exactly opposed to strictly maintained legalism – which is being obedient to rules. This is a deeply rooted evangelical notion. As a teacher of religion, of roman catholic religion, I consider enabling my students to grow as loving persons as the core of my vocation. To pave the way for a personal encounter with the risen Christ of the gospels. Because, in the end, it is about sharing the grace and the joy of love one has experienced – and for me that grace springs from the Gospel. It is this grace that makes me, as a teacher, curious for the grace, love and joy my students have experienced in their lives, and the humanizing sources they live by. So that we can both grow, and the whole of human society with us.

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