Extending ourselves
Public love in education, Part 2
I mentioned in Part 1 of this two-parter that feeling and observing my work evolve has been its own journey the last few years, one that has rarely been comfortable. As the ideas for this article were still forming, they decided to turn in a not-unexpected-but-still-unnerving direction, toward a radical revisioning of education itself.
Two years ago, I wrote about understanding trauma as a way to bring together various teaching approaches that focus on equity, justice, and accessibility. When we were working on the first season of the Galactic Cow, my cohost and I never questioned that love in education, specifically teaching, would be a major theme of at least one episode. More recently, I’ve been exploring trauma-responsive teaching as a harm reduction practice, as a way to build our capacity to be present with other people’s suffering, and a way to maintain connection during painful moments.
All of this thought and practice has been shaped by the absence of love - public love - in education. I’m not a classical scholar or philosopher, and I don’t have a deep theoretical history in civic virtue, public virtue, or civic love, or any of that vast socio-philosophical-political body of work. But I am an educator and practitioner whose main area of interest has been in the connection between education and incarceration. I wrote the first book about the impacts of trauma on adult learners, the first guide to teaching in prison, and I can say with confidence that public love in education is nonexistent.
That doesn’t mean that individual people (or departments or groups) can’t or don’t demonstrate loving behavior, or extend care to their students, but that - systemically - we do not love each other, nor do we teach people to love. Education is where we learn how to hurt each other in public. We learn who gets to do the hurting, who gets to be hurt, and what happens if we refuse either.
What would change if education was where we learned how to love each other in public? Using M. Scott Peck’s (by way of bell hooks in “All About Love”) definition of love as “The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s inner spiritual growth” gives us a place to begin. Peck did not make distinctions between the mind and spirit, or spiritual growth and mental growth, and he believed, as does hooks, that love requires effort; requires we extend ourselves to love each other, and love ourselves.
Education, whether public or private, is the one place we come together for a prolonged amount of time, with a shared purpose, even if that purpose often feels weak and unfocused. The other places we gather teach us different lessons: families teach us about interpersonal relationships, faith/non-faith groups teach us our relationship with the mysteries, athletics can teach us about teams and competition, and so on. All of the places we gather can teach us something about relationships, how we treat ourselves, each other, and the earth, but none have the comprehensive intersections of life present in educational spaces.
The presence of all that life makes the absence of love in those spaces one of the great, unrecognized societal wounds of our time.
Dr. Cornel West famously said “Justice is what love looks like in public” and I believe we do not have justice because we do not know how to love each other publicly. What would we learn, how would we change, in a system that taught us to extend ourselves in service of each other’s growth in shared, public spaces? To love each other publicly?
In addition to content, imagine a place where educators model what caring for people outside your immediate circle, for strangers, can look and feel like; a place where we intentionally pattern and teach behaviors and values associated with public love. Such behaviors and values could include
Ethical exercise of power
Shared consent
Accountability to self and others
Conflict and navigating change
Kindness in learning
Building and nurturing relationships; well-crafted boundaries
Connection and care for all life; tending the earth
Group wellness (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, environmental)
Creative purpose and endeavor
It is easy to get caught up in a delicious daydream of love in education as an idealized version of our personal values and beliefs - a place everyone would learn a particular view of the world, or how we “should” be in society. That type of daydreaming isn’t wrong but it is far too simplistic to survive in a society of such teeming complexity. We need to consider who we want to be in the largest sense; who we want our teachers to be, and the people we hope will emerge as a result of this shared learning experience.
It takes more than one person pondering such an idea for it to become anything other than a loving dream. Any shared journey into creation starts where we are, from a multitude of entry points and pathways, and the more openings into such an effortful, purposeful change, the better our chances of true transformation. Work of this nature does not happen by accident, magic, or miracle - it requires intention, concentration, collective creative effort, desire, and maintenance. We are capable of such endeavors, but it remains to be seen whether we will take that shared leap, trust in a shared purpose.
Education still holds the promise of a better future for humanity, for this planet, and all its gorgeous intricacies of life. We are long due a move in that more promising direction, and shaping education around extending ourselves in service to others can be that move.
