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In Teachers as Predators I begin to explore how teachers make powerful social predators. I encourage teachers to consider their own predatory urges, both because what we cannot imagine takes us most by surprise and what we refuse to see controls us most effectively.
Aviv asks me about the step following such self-inquiry. What happens when these find these urges within, discovering a desire to gain something from a student without regard to the student’s well-being? What next? Aviv mentions shame, will-power, and his reflection on what he really wants.
Shame and will-power are typical tools to keep student and teacher safe from the teacher’s greater power. But as we become more sophisticated in our self-inquiry, we can use methods more precise than the hammer of shame and the steam-roller of will. A finer tool is an unbiased examination of our internal constructions, both dark and light, grey and deeper grey.
To look within means we may see. Some of us fear that if we see something we will no longer be able to deny it exists, confusing desire and action. But examining our motivations does not force us to lose control or disregard the student’s best interest. We are not that simple.
Consider the committed predator; this one views others as sustenance to consume rather than entities to nurture. Do you feel shame or guilt when you eat a hamburger? A fish stick? An apple? An almond? At what point does the object of your desire simply become something to eat?
Imagine feeling this way about your student. How does this differ from you how you do feel? In such inquiry lies the insights that help us teach from understanding rather than fear.
I am painting a black and white picture, but our motivations are rarely so simple or uncluttered. Most teachers want what is best for their student while at the same time wanting what they want. To address such potentially conflicting drives, we must learn to see ourselves clearly so we can choose actions rather than being controlled by fears and denials.
A ruthless and unbiased examination of our internal motivations is critical to our teaching work. It is not what we desire or fear that damns us to our personal hells. It is what we refuse to see.
Lastly, this: we teach what we believe to be true, and we teach around what we refuse to see. What do we hide from ourselves, and how are we teaching it to our students?
In this post, Musha Shugyô divides teachers into three types: Sage, Seller, and Bard. I find this distinction useful.
A teacher may know the material deeply, may be able to communicate it well, or may be able to present it compellingly. Few teachers can do all three.
We as students may not know which of the three we are dealing with. It matters, but perhaps not the way we think.
And as teachers? We do not know how foreign are the lands to which we have never travelled.
The Seller and the Bard in Shugyô’s narrative have not been to the lands they think they have, where the Sage has lived, but they may well be able to offer the student a clearer view of this foreign land than can the Sage.
Students believe they want to learn from experts, from those who come from these foreign lands, but this is not so. They want to be taught by those who can best bridge the gap between the Sage’s experience and their current context, and that is not always the Sage.
Teachers make the best predators because they are already on the inside of the student’s trust. They know how to assume authority, control attention, and evoke compliance – all essential predatory skills.
Predatory teachers use their teaching platform for personal profit at the student’s expense. Instead of attending to the student’s benefit and being mindful of their own integration, such teachers take from the student, sacrificing both the relationship with the student and their own integrity.
These teachers are socially maladapted. That is, their actions not only harm the student but also harm the concentric circles of community and social trust that surround and infuse the teaching relationship, rippling that damage out into the larger society. The resulting problems can affect many people over long spans of time.
Why are students vulnerable to such teachers? Deep study with a teacher echoes our most profound early experiences, in which knowledgeable and powerful entities take critical care of us. Thus even experienced and mature adults can be as vulnerable as children to charismatic and insightful teachers. These teachers can move us, take us off balance, and convince us that they know us better than we know ourselves. This makes it easy for them to manipulate us, to take things that are not in our best interest to give.
What motivates such teachers? Some do not fully realize what they are doing. Some find ways to rationalize, to refuse to see how their actions serve themselves at significant cost to the student.
Many social predators find ways to take repeatedly, not destroying their prey but keeping it alive to feed again and again. Often the student is an active part of this deleterious dynamic, helping to create a symbiotic relationship, an exchange of favors and demands, a mutual knot of obligation and manipulation.
But however complicit the student may be, the teacher, who has the greater influence and power, has primary responsibility to act in the student’s best interest. To teach with integrity.
To protect our students from predators, we must first be able to recognize predation, in others and in ourselves. To understand how we ourselves might walk such a dark path opens our eyes to relevant patterns and gives us useful tools. Excellence in teaching requires us as teachers to become familiar with our darkest sides so that we do not, in ignorance, teach them. So that we neither prey upon our students nor create students who are ready to be preyed upon.
It takes courage and determination to look into our own darkness. As teachers of depth we must look there because what is hidden controls us most completely. Only when we percieve ourselves down to our most unpleasant foundations and can regard our flaws without bias can we be confident that our actions – and the actions of others – are in the student’s best interest.
My offered practice: take a moment of your teaching and student interactions to ask yourself what you might gain if you were both acquisitive and willing to disregard your student’s welfare. Dwell in that imagining for a moment. Next consider what you might do with an opposite intent and a willingness to nurture the student and their learning. Repeat the practice, noticing also your own reaction.
This is one of the most important questions a teacher can ask. I once considered it the least important of questions. What did it matter what I wanted? Surely more important questions involved the nature of duty, fidelity, God, and truth.
But when teaching deeply, if you cannot touch what the student really wants, cannot unearth a deep and profound desire, you cannot motivate them to pursue understanding on their own. To look beyond what is in front of them. To do what is necessary to walk the path.
It behooves the teacher of depth to ask themselves this same question, and to ask as often as it takes to find the bedrock of answer beneath the sands, the ring of truth beyond the mirages of fear and hope.
Without taking on this question at depth, without pursuing its answer diligently, we can hardly expect to put ourselves on a course of study and exploration, and we can even less expect the student to follow our example.
After the simple answers are dispensed with, the ones we adopt from the world around us, we often find we do not know. So accustomed are we to accepting our answers from our culture, so unfamiliar are we with asking beyond a casual query, that we are often hard-pressed to find authentic desire within ourselves. We simply do not have the practice.
And so, practice this. Ask. Ask again.
The answer may change over time. Or perhaps the heart of it never changes, but only in appearance, like the moon in phases. Such change is all right. It is the asking that is important.
My offered practice: find an opportunity to ask your student this question in some form or another. Listen for the ring of truth in the answer, the sense that you have gotten close to the heart of the matter, without giving too much weight to the form in which it arrives. Learn to listen for the ring of truth. Learn to ask again.
I began this writing in October of 2006. This post marks the anniversary of my fourth year.
I found beginning this work to be a challenge. I wondered if my observations about excellence in teaching were too obvious to be useful. I wondered if readers would challenge my credentials. I wondered if I could successfuly convey what mattered most to me.
These concerns, I realized, were universal to all teachers. I decided to bring myself and my experience to this platform in the hopes of offering other teachers both companionship and inspiration.
Since then I have posted nearly 200 articles. I have, fortunately for all concerned, learned to tighten my presentations a bit, perhaps to write with a lighter touch.
What was popular this year? What is a Teacher? continues to be one of my most read articles, as does Ten Mistakes Teachers Make, a combination I find heartening. Also popular this year was Anger, one of my early articles, written in the hopes that if I put what I had learned into words I might remember it.
My personal favorites this year include The Dirty Secret of Education, and Ending a Teaching, and my interview with Matt Harmless, a Christian teacher and pastor, on his views about education, religion, and student challenge.
I am now interviewing another teacher from a different faith, and look forward to sharing that interview with you in the coming year.
My thanks to all who have made this last year possible. Those of you who have written to me or commented on on my articles have provided me with both inspiration and companionship, the very things I was hoping to offer when I began. I look forward to more.
I am deeply grateful.
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