Original article – March 2007 – Régis Alain Barbier
1. To guide the student to recognize and express a deep gratitude to the teaching master for the opportunity to learn and be taught.
The human species is endowed, by evolutionary nature, with a magnificent, excellent and unique central nervous system. A 'neurological center of ideomotor processing' — the cerebral cortex processing cognition (ideas and acts) — naturally promoting the specific functional predominances of the human state of being, such as: 1) a good disposition of observation in all sensory channels; 2) great capacity for integration of stimuli; 3) extraordinary imitative and creative aptitude. Thus constructed by nature, homo sapiens — provably — does not humanize himself (does not realize himself as a human being) without receiving a strong cultural transmission of knowledge, to a sufficient degree and quality. The most fundamental knowledge being: having the opportunity to learn to recognize oneself as one is, not as someone or a school 'would like one to be': to be truly respected in one's quality of autonomy and creativity. To recognize oneself as: 1) a highly differentiated specific being (an 'entity' in the language of philosophers); 2) existentially adequate; creative and free from preconceived and predetermined, narrow and utilitarian or even ideal and abstract finalisms; 3) a vanguard being, bearer of nature's 'quality seal', that is, in sufficient material, energetic and historical harmony with its environment (a thing attested by the simple fact of prevailing and being alive); 4) thanks to this specific human talent, endowed with creativity and autonomy (freedom from a cultural standpoint) to tread new paths, new unforeseeable forms of culture from what it receives from tradition; 5) freedom even to place oneself in accidental and dangerous situations. A freedom, autonomy and plasticity denoted, sung and spoken, since the beginnings of philosophy.
2. To make the teacher-educator aware of the need to persist in their intention, considering the nature and qualities of the student; always dialoguing in search of resources adequate to the needs and peculiarities of each one, maintaining a firm optimism that the educational intent will be fulfilled.
To walk in search of being human, a being of self-knowledge and self-determination, is to arrive at placing oneself in the position of being responsible for oneself: 1) aware of one's nature (a being of autonomy, freedom and responsibility); 2) aware of one's attitudes, behaviors, feelings, thoughts; 3) in contact with one's unique, specific and peculiar talents. Such achievement implies receiving and benefiting from a peculiar and individual attention, beyond a mere 'general counseling' or 'minimum curriculum' or 'official, traditional'. A deep integration, realization and congruent and confident harmonization of the being with itself — its potentials — with the other and with the world is possible. But only by enjoying a receptive and attentive, specific listening, where there is opportunity to express one's doubts, perceptions, integrations and intuitions (necessarily unique and unparalleled at this degree of complexity, intelligence and diversity). Questioning students (stimulating the expression and definition of thought and ideas; sharing changes of viewpoint and understandings, elaborating together) is the fundamental method for constructing philosophical conceptual planes, opening to freedom and autonomy, to the conscious individualization of being, guaranteeing the overcoming of ideological influxes; of massification and atomization; of formatting in the light of traditions understood as absolute and final: that is, in search of a human society: open, creative and genuine: of creative nature.
3. To show that one of the highest goals of education is simply to help the student become a teacher-educator of himself.
To educate is not to prune, or to train for an end pointed out by authority, traditions, old concepts, consensual determinations, policies, etc.: that would be 'indoctrinating'. To educate is to draw out and nourish what comes from within. It is to teach a beginning, a principle; it is to help the student come into contact with himself; with his origin and nature, with the mystery of being: to be aware and active in the world. The mystery of being a bearer of life: of being an active, intelligent, sensitive and experimenting force; in search of affirmation, understanding, recognition, respect and happiness. To educate is essentially to support the student in actively placing himself in the creative position of eternal learner. To evoke an open curiosity, willing to challenge all concepts on equal ground, respect, friendship and trust. The trust of being a bearer: 1) of an infinite energetic heritage; empathetic and sympathetic to the cosmos: universal; as well as: 2) a receiver and transmitter of a philosophical culture in search of wisdom to always be updated, refined, rebuilt at each birth, at each breath of life.
4. Philosophy can clarify that what is good and best to learn cannot be taught positively in the formula: master 'x', training disciple 'y' in the objective of becoming skilled and formed for 'z'.
The supreme skill of being human is 'being human' simply. It is not being an 'ideal'; or an 'instinctive mechanism'; or yet a 'clay puppet' in the hands of some distant, absent, temperamental, incomprehensible god essentially different in nature, talent and state of being. It is about becoming wise and skilled in oneself, and per se, as a human being. A being of light, shadow and darkness; like nature. A son/daughter of the sun, of light, of the stars, of day and night, of space-time. A being capable and skilled at recognizing in itself all potentials — for war, for peace, for creative joy or the most austere and rigid fundamentalism: that is, for 'being well' and for 'being ill'. A being capable — if willing — of choosing to be good because aware and well (self-)educated to recognize and understand that being good is good. Seeking to be good and happy, euthymic, is the best one can be in the state of being human belonging to a world where everything transforms, remakes and recreates; everything arises to dissolve and resurface in other totally diverse forms, but of the same architecture. Creative movements in coordinates and rhythms of undefined, immense breadth; definitively beyond the possible understanding of a simple part of the whole.
5. But only in the formula: the friend-brother, companion and equal 'x' is, out of love and free choice and will, disposed to help 'y' to awaken to their essential nature 'z' as a place (ethos) where ethics can dwell.
Would there be a more essential teaching? Could this side be left unemphasized? To see in the other a home where morality, ethics dwells. To be for the other an honest and sincere tenant of the same home. To only affirm what one actually knows, to present myths as myths, legends as legends, suppositions as suppositions, beliefs as beliefs, truths as truths, knowledge as knowledge, to hide nothing. To be honest in one's own dimension of being; not wanting to be more than one can — or less. Presenting oneself as spokesperson of a group, a sect, a tradition, a nation, an association of any kind is not educating to be human, but to be a member, associate, conditioned of the same profession. Ethics requires, by nature, that the human being be presented with all points of view, all ways of directing, of conducting a people, a nation, a tribe. Ethics requires that they be left free to choose the organization to which to affiliate, associate, and this for as long as they see fit, find good, profitable, creative, enriching. To recognize oneself as an eternal place of creation, of respect, of openness and love.
6. That the straightest path, the only way to truly form a 'human being', is to teach that the essential cannot be taught, but learned from within oneself.
Each one is born a credited depositor of more than fifteen billion years of natural experiences; beyond the qualities received in culture, each one may, searching, seeking, find and connect with the heritage of many peoples and nations, with the wisdom of many philosophers. Each one must confront choices. One of them — perhaps among the most important — will be: to go beyond one's traditions, to overcome and enrich what was given and learned as if by osmosis, or not. That is, to be the bearer of a torch of living and new light; carried by oneself, in one's own living and human hand; or else a passive vehicle of cold images and representations drawn by others, in other times, with other words, other classifications: old conceptual plans, now incomprehensible, illogical, mythified, poorly adapted, disembodied, like beings of other eras and times.
7. That 'ways of doing', methods, procedures, data — things that can be taught — are more easily transmitted when wanting to learn together.
The essence of practical knowledge is not its content, but rather the way it originated in the triple context: 1) of necessity; 2) of the historical moment; 3) of the understanding then available. This interaction observed and commented upon allows one to update the capacity to review, rethink and update knowledge besides learning it and making good use of it.
8. Philosophy can demonstrate the value of teaching as if in a public square; where all are equally appreciated; and could freely sit without special distinctions.
The proper framework for learning to be human is the circle; in a circle one cannot fit too many people, massify, diametrically distancing the participants tending to become less visible, inaudible. In the circle all are equal, knowing that they share the same origin and destiny, the same nature, the same vital cycles; life is appreciated as it is in its entirety, in adequate proportions; in the universal geometry of spheres. The world is a circle, the horizon too: sometimes one does not know if experience comes before concepts or if concepts determine experience. All bear the same complexity, forged in the same universal heritage and duration; all deserve the same deep respect, the same right to share what is equally given by nature where the sun shines for all; where the earth belongs to no one, but all possess.
9. Where all would have the opportunity to participate equally in a calm and joyful dialogue; orderly and respectful; friendly.
Dialogue, the dialogic, reveals infinite potentials, unveils an unforeseeable intelligence. The dialogic does not give access to a path already traced forever; it creates and generates innumerable ways. Dialogue does not reveal, as if by a hidden force, a single path revealed to privileged elements, strangers, supernaturally endowed with knowledge impossible to proceed naturally and truly settle, contextualize, and bear fruit, on the plane where they are applied. The dialogic reveals a complexity impossible to be mastered by a single element: it is the means by which the multiple and diverse knowledge of a multitude of individual contributors validates and channels itself. Knowledge that potentializes, expands, perfects as if elaborated by a genius. The genius we are together, seeing each one as a genius.
10. The good 'student-teacher' relationship is when the teacher does not separate himself hierarchically from the students: appearing to be more a student learning, than a 'master teacher' teaching.
The good educator knows that they learn by teaching; that one neither teaches nor learns: that one learns by teaching and teaches by learning. The creative listening of the student and their unforeseen responses attest to living, open, true teachings, in harmony with the creative and renewing force of the universal system.
11. An educator placing the problems encountered in the light of day and of the community of students; asking: but what is it? Why is it? How could it have originated? How can it evolve? What are the possible paths? Would there be a fixed and already defined becoming? Could such a becoming be known by one of the elements of the process evolving in the becoming? Where should it go; how should it be, according to the knowledge one has and can have? What are the possible destinations? A systemic and fluid student-educator relationship demonstrating that educating is not 'schooling', much less 'scholastic promotion'.
A teacher capable of differentiating that educating is different from recruiting, convincing, politicizing, converting using old and archaic rhetoric as if they were final words. The doctor does not cause the cure; the teacher does not cause knowledge: because the doctor is not everything, the teacher is not everything, they are not special spokespeople of nature — whether understood as 'alpha' or 'omega' — but rather finite parts of the totality apt to reveal greater knowledge by sharing moments, dialoguing, jointly configuring understandings eternally perfectible, within universal nature embodied in mystery: even if artificially clothed in mythical imagination in certainty and conviction. This is educating in accordance with the 'philosophical spirit'; and this differs radically from some catechisms as imposed in theological formations. That dogmatic ideologies be presented as ideologies, teleologisms settled in unsubstantiated, mythical predictions; that open teachings be defined as open to the new, the creative, free.
12. Philosophy can help understand that 'being human' is being an unparalleled and infinite openness of knowledge, flowing and perfecting through oneself the grace of nature. That 'being' is grace from nature and 'human' is by oneself; well-willing.
Human nature is a free conjunction of categorical imperatives, because it is an intelligent conjunction! And a junction of a state of 'being' and of a 'nature'; of act and thing; of verb and object. It is about a well-felt, living conjunction, associated with a greatness and changing order of uncertain origin and unknown destination. Who can claim to be the ineluctable master of destiny and if so, pretend to be taken seriously by anyone who is not 'simple' in the sense of deeply credulous, absurd? Only the change is known, the cycles, to be born, to die: we are aware of a passage between two distant, mysterious and unreachable infinities; two natural graces configuring possibility of destiny, options and choices. One may recognize, having and cultivating the true philosophical and open spirit: that in these existential circumstances there is a more sensible way of being: to be detached, flexible, open to other teachings than the medieval ones, free from imagined and rigid imperatives, open to change: recognizing above all the limits of analytical and logical reason, the essentiality of immediate knowledge constructed and gifted by the simple act of being in the world, of the world, of belonging entirely to 'mother nature' as it can be seen and touched, known and equally known to be unreachable in its greatness and majesty.
13. To teach that 'being human' is an indissoluble society between cosmic nature and being: and that being human is good, beautiful and well. To educate can only be done supported by true philosophy that demonstrates that the human scale is what best suits the human being.
That 'being nature' is to recognize oneself without reductive fantasies, is to accept oneself with gratitude, and to see that as nature we can be benevolent or malevolent, that choosing to be good is good, to be bad is bad. That in this place where all feed on all, where our bodies and ashes will nourish the beings that nurture us, being prudent, temperate, modest, courageous, just, measured and loving is simply 'naturally intelligent'. Trusting oneself is trusting well-educated humanity. To educate well is to listen, to be attentive to the other specifically. For this it is necessary to adequately reduce what separates the community mainly at the level of projects, relations and organization, i.e., (in the same order) 1) in philosophical contemplation (metaphysics); 2) in the economic sphere; 3) in the political sphere. A functional and humanist mythical foundation should not separate the divine plane from the human plane (uniting the planes and respecting the mystery) — as happened in Ionia before the advent of Zoroastrianism — allowing the human being to naturally elevate their existential (or essential) self-esteem. A myriad of communities settled on the human scale where the decision-making power of each one would be equally considered — paradoxically atomizing power so that it is one in essence and in the ethos where it rests. The adequate scale (recognized, accepted, embraced and well tailored to realistic measures), at all essential levels of human organization, is equally: 1) an act of surrender and trust, as well as; 2) a means by which to install trust: this because the human being is in itself subject.
14. What more (or less) could philosophy teach education?
As a philosophical spirit, what more?! Logical structures? Rhetoric of ancient schools? Uses, customs and habits relative to this or that predominant tribe? In truth, philosophy contributes nothing to education: it is the 'soul', the essence of education! Imagining a 'philosophy of education' as an instrument contributing something already attests to something 'perceptibly' out of plumb and orientation!
RB
