Birch David - Provocations: Philosophy for Secondary School

During teacher training I was told by the director of the course that the relationship between a teacher and their pupil should be like that of a lawyer and their client. The idea, generously read it is hard to shake off just how mad and dystopian it sounds seems to be that teachers are experts and teaching is a profession, an idea which I think gets it exactly wrong, more or less. Expertise demands recognition and deference , yet adolescents are the least likely of all people to offer either. A professional teacher is a naked emperor to an incredulous audience. It is impossible to maintain the poise of expertise while spending your day with people who could care less. Composure quickly ebbs away.

The expert is the one in the white coat, unstained and uninvolved. They are never in the thick of it, never in a muddle. I doubt the course director could so easily have spoken of the relationship between a primary school or nursery teacher and a child as being like that of a lawyer and client, which makes one wonder what it is about adolescence that requires this redefinition of status. What compels us to play these parts, when teachers call for order by telling their class to act like professionals ? We feel it necessary to assign adolescents roles, but they are provocatively ill-defined; the thing we least want them to be is themselves (which, of course, is often the thing they least want to be; we become complicit in their self-evasion; there is perhaps something worryingly contagious about adolescence).

An expert is a coincidence of fear and need. Teachers should not think of themselves as needed (nor should they need themselves to be feared). You can only counteract the evidence to the contrary by telling yourself that you are doing what is best for your pupils, whether they know it or not. But its very difficult to talk about knowing whats best for someone without implying that you know whats worst about them. Its very difficult to say, This is for your own good, without sounding like a sadist. Necessity and punishment are cut from the same cloth.

What would education be like if we dropped the idea that it was necessary, if we didnt think of it as something we had to get right, if we werent so worried about getting it wrong? What would we do with it if we didnt think there was any way it should be, if we thought of it as spare time?

We think of lawyers or doctors as experts because they more or less have control over their respective remits. The doctor pretty much knows the effects of administering a particular treatment; the lawyer can pretty much tell the best line of defence and the odds of success.

What is it teachers are thought to have control over? The idea, apparently, is that teachers are experts of impartation they know how to give skills and knowledge. In other words, a teacher can control the outcomes of their teaching. So whereas the lawyer has a level of control over a bureaucratic system of justice and a doctor has a level of control over the body, the teacher has a level of control over the minds of adolescents. This, of course, just sounds silly. What we all know, but rarely acknowledge, is that you cannot teach a pupil something they dont want to learn; the managerial need for evidence is the denial of this.

Learning is a matter of desire, not a question of cognition; of magnetism rather than machinery. How would teaching change if we worked on the basis that we didnt know what we were doing, if we worked not for targets but curiosity, if we thought of the classroom not as a proto-office but as the bit outside the office, the so-called real world? I suggest it may be something like philosophy.

There is nothing essentially good about doing philosophy in schools pupils may just as well learn to surf or garden just as there is nothing essential to, say, English or chemistry. I do not teach philosophy to impart skills, nor do I read it to acquire them (Id rather talk of developing affinities, not abilities). I dont teach philosophy for knowledge as there is none (Id rather give provocation than information). Without knowledge or skills what remains are the pupils themselves. The approach to education advocated in this book is one not based on teaching but listening; listening neither to console nor redeem but to crack things wide open.