Kindness eases change
I started writing this piece after listening to adrienne maree brown read from Parable of the Sower on Instagram. She mentioned the title of chapter 15, “Kindness eases change,” and I immediately thought about learning and change, that there is no learning that does not change us. I believe the intense and violent struggle over education we are all living is about exactly this: learning IS change. There is NO learning that does not stir change, and whatever our critiques of education, teaching is built into learning.
We teachers have not handled our responsibility to change very well. There are, of course, an enormous number of other factors but we’ve forgotten that one of our most important responsibilities is to help people learn how to embrace and welcome change. If we ever knew, we have forgotten that kindness is the foundation of this process; that kindness during learning, as people question, make mistakes, try again, misunderstand, lose their tempers, rage, cry, and strike out, is ours to sow and nourish.
Education is not kind. It does not teach or extend kindness. It does not reward or even acknowledge kindness. It is one of the most unkind spaces, and I grieve at how thoroughly learning is tangled in that unkindness. When I meet teachers in person, they so often come into the space guarded, nerves vibrating, on high alert. Their uncertainty and distrust is dense, filling the air, and my lungs. It pierces my heart that asking teachers to explore and imagine conjures such feelings of risk and danger.
More and more, I feel like the best thing I can be in a roomful of teachers is kind. I can slow my breath, soften my eyes, move gently, speak clearly but with tenderness, relax my throat and voice, pause frequently, set a regular, measured, steady pace of interaction, and let them feel what a pleasure it is to be in that space with them. I want to extend that feeling of "I am with you"; that I am present to their experience and in sympathy - in resonance - with that experience.
My description is deeply physical in part because surviving in education demands both disassociation from and cruelty to our physical selves. For me, kindness is a felt sensation of no separation, a reminder that we are the same kind. And as we are of the same kind, I do for you as I do for myself. I know what cruelty and meanness feel like, we all do. Classrooms are where we learn how to extend that cruelty and meanness to each other in public ways, learn who gets to be cruel and who must suffer.
Being kind, or ‘in kind’, with each other places us in direct opposition the demands of both the culture and system of education. The four pillars of toxicity in education - competition, isolation, assimilation, and domination - are held in place by our cruelty and mistreatment of each other. Deciding to end those behaviors is risky but maintaining them has already inflicted deadly consequences on us, and our planet. Knowing the consequences of this indulgence, how can risking kindness be worse?
We cannot be truly kind to others if we are cruel to ourselves so, if we desire kindness, we must practice being kind – internally and externally. As we bring kindness into those public spaces, and face our own fear of change, we bring an undiscovered tenderness to our students and communities. Education could be the place where we learn how to be kind, to be tender and caring for each other in public, and kindness is a step in that direction.
