About an hour ago, I completed a preliminary draft of my dissertation, “Education, Study, and the Person.” I have posted the final section entitled, “Who Shall We Teach? – Teachers,” here. It is only a draft, and a rough one at that, but hopefully it gets the broad point across to you—if you’re interested.
When we see it in its barest form, the art of teaching is the art of existing, the art of becoming a person. To teach requires a relational ontology that might seem to overlap the already present ontology of the person. But here is the answer to our riddle: there is no ontological distinction between person and teacher. Because of this, the task of teaching can be found in the demands of existence, in the very fabric of the world. This suggests the fundamental value of phenomenological methods for teaching and ontology in general as grave subject matter for teachers. It also points to the tragic love that teaching requires. Facing these ontological requisites, the question becomes “Who?” Who shall we teach?
Leaving aside the broad cultural and political replies one might present to this question, we can imagine the process of entering the classroom—wherever that may be—to encounter the pupil. Who will it be? A mystery? A ghost? Or, perhaps, a person: that singular thing that is ontologically plural. The broad and general critique of the times tells us that persons are something of an endangered species, and this mostly true. But when a teacher encounters her student, we find a moment that is new and pregnant with imagination for the person to re-appear. Thus, these pages are not for the dreamer, they are for the teacher. Education, then, becomes the site of hope for tragic transformation.
To be specific, I am thinking of the actual, physical approach—the phenomenological event. The gathering of books and papers and other teaching things and walking down the hall, adjusting a waistline, necktie, or collar; the moments when the teacher runs a hand through his hair or checks her make-up, wondering: Who will be inside that room? Who will those names on the roster become? How will they appear? What will they disclose? Who will I see? Will they like me? Shall I love them? Those curiosity before one enters a classroom for the first time is not so different from the “first-day-of-school” feeling a student has and is likely to be felt by the student on this day too, especially if they do not know the teacher beforehand. This particular event seems to be a poignant time and place to begin things anew—to put the person into the ancient relations of tragic love.
After the sight of the person to be tragically loved is settled, then, the question reappears: Who shall we teach? The answer slowly becomes slightly different: Who is teaching? Who is the teacher?
It is fashionable to blur the line between teacher and student. Ontologically speaking, this would be overly complicated. The simple fact is that persons are teachers, moved by erotic study, living amidst the mystery of education that we find ourselves in.
This is our task: to be, live, and exist. In short, to teach.
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