Afterward

On Being Human Well

Much have I learned from my teachers,
more from my colleagues,
but most from my students.
–The Talmud

The renowned art historian, Norris K. Smith, once remarked that the purpose of life is not so much to be a well human being as to learn to be human well.¹ I have thought about this ideal a lot in my years in the classroom, and at the back of my mind, I have always tried to remember that it is indeed the real task of all teaching and learning to help my students discover the authentic imago dei they are each capable of becoming and to aid them in drawing out their true self.  It is why I believe “being a teacher is a way of life”² and not just a job or even simply a profession.

Yet, what has amazed and humbled me the most in my career is how much “the children themselves [have] offered me what I needed to [to become human well]”³ rather than the other way around.  There have been so many experiences like the ones recounted throughout this project that I could have devoted my writing to nothing but such recounting, and in fact, the challenge in finding moments in my career to illustrate the various points in my arguments has been to choose among the seemingly infinite number of times I have learned and relearned the same thing.  At that point, I think Joseph Joubert grossly underestimated when he wrote that “to teach is to learn twice over”⁴ because, in truth, to teach is to learn endlessly.

Furthermore, out of all the experiences that have transformed and molded me into who I am as an educator today has come an insight into a fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of what I think it means to learn to be human well:  namely that we must repeatedly experience both sin and salvation in order to be whole.  “Indeed, [just as] breathing itself is a [biological] form of paradox, requiring inhaling and exhaling”⁵ for an organism to survive, so too are the cycles of alienation and grace a paradox the self needs if it is to endure.  The regular moments of despair and redemption we experience throughout life are the soul’s spiritual equivalent to respiration, and in the taking in and letting out of the “air” of awareness that allows us to derive meaning from these times, our self finds the nourishment it needs to persist in the face of life’s challenges. 

However, there is an even larger truth to this paradox that my students have shown me, and that is that just as the purpose of biological breathing isn’t the breathing itself, neither is the soul’s.  Inhaling and exhaling of every kind–literal and spiritual–are simply what it takes to make life possible.  It is what we then do with this life that genuinely matters, and that’s where education serves its highest purpose.  Teaching and learning at their very essence are about helping people figure out what to do with their “breathing,” and that’s why the kind of “doing” we engage in in schools is so critical.  There are lots of possible ways to make meaning with our lives, and many of them–as history bears out–are not worthy of our veneration and promotion.  It is therefore an awesome power and responsibility we have as educators to nurture in our children what it means to be human well, and we must do everything in our capacity to remain worthy of the trust implicit in that charge.

That is why I believe what I have said in this project is so critical.  The very survival of our world may genuinely be at stake, today, and we truly will reap what we sow.  Only the teacher who is authentically engaged in her, his, or their classroom can create the kinds of higher meanings that will show students how to be human well, and only such an individual can also maintain such deportment in his, her, or their own life.  The qualities of teaching and learning we have discussed here involve the very essence of what it takes to be a worthy and worthwhile person, and only when educators who do their best to embody these ideals engage in regular, on-going dialogue with our children can we have any hope that these same children will someday come to embody them as well.

I grant that it will be neither simple nor easy to achieve this vision of education I have presented here; nothing of value ever is.  But our country needs people who will fight education’s current culture of “pathological caution,”⁶ and until all of us who teach seek to make the highest possible meaning with our professional lives that evokes the highest possible meaning making in others, neither the present situation in our schools nor the one in our society will ever change. 

We must all seek to become human well, and it is out of my own effort to do so that I hope these words have been worthy of my own walk in that path.

D.L.B.