Perhaps the most basic of these attitudes [which facilitate learning] is realness or genuineness. When the facilitator is a real person, being what he is, entering into a relationship with the learner without presenting a front or a facade, he is much more likely to be effective. This means that the feelings which he is experiencing are available to him, available to his awareness, that he is able to live these feelings, be them, and able to communicate them if appropriate. It means that he comes into a direct personal encounter with the learner, meeting him on a person-to-person basis. It means that he is being himself, not denying himself. …
Thus, [the teacher] is a person to his students, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement nor a sterile tube through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.
It is obvious that this attitudinal set, found to be effective in psychotherapy, is sharply in contrast with the tendency of most teachers to show themselves to their pupils simply as roles. It is quite customary for teachers rather consciously to put on the mask, the role, the facade, of being a teacher, and to wear this facade all day removing it only when they have left the school at night. [Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become, Charles E. Merrill, 1969, pp. 106-107]
[George Dennison] rightly said that one reason why schooling is so seldom helpful to children, and almost always deeply harmful, is that they have no reality of encounter with their teachers. The teachers are not themselves, but players of roles. They do not talk about what is real to them, what they know, are interested in, and love, but about what the curriculum, the teachers’ manual, and the lesson plan says they must talk about. “Start a discussion about…” They do not respond naturally and honestly to the acts and needs of the children, but only as the rules tell them to respond. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 23-24]
Apart from family, children have little speech with any adults except schoolteachers. But the crowding and scheduling in school allow little chance or time for personal conduct. Also, increasingly in grade schools as well as in colleges, the teachers have abdicated their personal role to specialist counsellors and administrators, so that confiding and guidance tend to occur only in extreme situations. One must be “deviant” to be attended to as a human being. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, p. 66]
There is no such thing as learning except (as Dewey tells us) in the continuum of experience. But this continuum cannot survive in the classroom unless there is reality of encounter between the adults and the children. The teachers must be themselves, and not play roles. They must teach the children, and not teach “subjects.” The child, after all, is avid to acquire what he takes to be the necessities of life, and the teacher must not answer him with mere professionalism and gimmickry. The continuum of experience and reality of encounter are destroyed in the public schools (and most private ones) by the very methods which form the institution itself—the top-down organization, the regimentation, the faceless encounters, the empty professionalism, and so on. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, pp. 73-74]
[W]e need to understand what the process of rewarding does to the interaction between giver and receiver. Someone who is raising or teaching children, for example, probably wants to create a caring alliance with each child, to help him or her feel safe enough to ask for help when problems develop. This is very possibly the single most fundamental requirement for helping a child to grow up healthy and develop a set of good values. For academic reasons, too, an adult must nurture just such a relationship with a student if there is to be any hope of the student’s admitting mistakes freely and accepting guidance. …
This is precisely what rewards and punishments kill. If your parent or teacher or manager is sitting in judgment of what you do, and if that judgment will determine whether good things or bad things happen to you, this cannot help but warp your relationship with that person. You will not be working collaboratively in order to learn or grow; you will be trying to get him or her to approve of what you are doing so you can get the goodies. [Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, p. 57]
My own demands … were an important part of Jose’s experience. They were not simply the demands of a teacher, nor of an adult, but belonged to my own way of caring about Jose. And he sensed this. There was something he prized in the fact that I made demands on him. This became all the more evident once he realized that I wasn’t simply processing him, that is, grading, measuring etc. And when he learned that he could refuse—could refuse altogether, could terminate the lesson, could change its direction, could insist on something else—our mutual interest in his development was taken quite for granted. We became collaborators in the business of life.
Obviously, if I had tried to compel him, none of this would have been possible. And if I had made no demand—had simply waited for him to come to class—I would in some sense have been false to my own motives, my own engagement in the life of the school and the community. In his eyes I would have lost immediacy, would have lost reality, as it were, for I would have seemed more and more like just a teacher. What he prized after all was this: that an adult, with a life of his own, was willing to teach him.
How odd it is to have to say this! What a vast perversion of the natural relations of children and adults has been worked by our bureaucratized system of public education? It was important to Jose that I was not just a teacher, but a writer as well, that I was interested in painting and had friends who were artists, that I took part in civil rights demonstrations. To the extent that he sensed my life stretching out beyond him into (for him) the unknown, my meaning as an adult was enhanced, and the things I already knew and might teach him gained the luster they really possess in life. This is true for every teacher, every student. No teacher is just a teacher, no student just a student. The life meaning which joins them is the sine qua non for the process of education, yet precisely this is destroyed in the public schools because everything is standardized and the persons are made to vanish into their roles. This is exactly Sartre’s definition of inauthenticity. I am reminded here, too, of how often John Dewey and, in our own time, Paul Goodman and Elliott Shapiro have urged the direct use of the community. The world as it exists is what the young are hungry for; and we give them road maps, mere diagrams of the world at a distance. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, pp. 112-114]
[Maxine] needed to know exactly where the power lay. It was as if she were asking herself on what terms she could be part of a group, on what terms have her personal wishes gratified. What good thing might be offered her in return for giving up her infantile desires? She wanted to know, too, which aspects of her teachers’ behavior constituted the true authority of adult life. …
How did Maxine ask this dualistic question? She asked it by stealing Dodie’s soda pop, and by shouting some loud irrelevancy when Rudella was trying to question her teacher, and by taking all the magnets from the other children and kicking her teacher in the shins, and by grabbing Elena’s cookies at lunchtime. And what answers did she receive? But let me describe the public-school answers first, for she had done the very same things in the public school. She had stolen someone’s cookies, but it was the teacher who responded, not the victim; and so Maxine could not find out the meaning of her action among her peers. Nor could that long and subtle chain of children’s reactions—with all their surprising turns of patience and generosity—even begin to take shape. And when Maxine confronted the teacher directly, shouting in class and drowning her out she was punished in some routine way and was again deprived of the individual relational response which would have meant much to her. Yet she kept pressing on, creating crisis after crisis, always insisting upon relation. … [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, pp. 203-208]
[M]odern education systems are cluttered with every sort of distraction. There are political agendas, national priorities, union bargaining positions, building codes, job descriptions, parental ambitions, peer pressures. The list goes on. But the heart of education is the relationship between the student and the teacher. Everything else depends on how productive and successful that relationship is. If that is not working, then the system is not working. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, p. 71]
If any single fact has been established by psychotherapy research, it is that a positive relationship between patient and therapist is positively related to the therapy outcome. Effective therapists respond to their patients in a genuine manner; they establish a relationship that a patient perceives as safe and accepting; they display a nonpossessive warmth and a high degree of accurate empathy and are able to “be with” or “grasp the meaning” of the patient. [Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, Basic Books, 1980, p. 401]
In a recent study of cognitive behavioral therapy, perceived therapist genuineness was found to be the single most important predictor of the therapeutic alliance, and authenticity has been identified as an important component of mentoring. [E. Jung et al., 2015; M. Larsson et al., 2016; R. Spencer, 2006] Thus, a key step in establishing an alliance with youth is to convey a sense of being authentically engaged and invested. [M. J. Karcher, C. Herrera, and K. Hansen, 2010; S. D. McQuillin et al., 2019] [Jean E. Rhodes, Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century, Harvard UP, 2020, p. 115]
To an existential therapist, when “technique” is made paramount, everything is lost because the very essence of the authentic relationship is that one does not manipulate but turns toward another with one’s whole being.
Many therapists have difficulty relating authentically to patients because of presuppositions and stereotypes. The training of therapists emphasizes diagnosis and classification; they are taught to objectify patients, to arrive at an APA (American Psychiatric Association) code number that pins a patient like a specimen to an admission work-up or an insurance form. And, indeed, no responsible therapist can deny there is a place for diagnostic evaluation. …
Too often diagnostic categorization is a stimulating intellectual exercise whose sole function is to provide the therapist with a sense of order and mastery. The major task of the maturing therapist is to learn to tolerate uncertainty. What is required is a major shift in perspective: rather than strive to order the interview “material” into an intellectually coherent framework, the therapist must strive toward authentic engagement. [Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, Basic Books, 1980, p. 409-411]
We have encouraged parents to represent themselves as they really are and not feel obligated to build themselves up in the child’s eyes. Parental honesty to some extent prevents the child’s idealizing the parents and family to the child’s detriment. Similarly, we have suggested to parents that they perceive their children realistically and not build them up falsely. …
It is vital that parents not mislead their children about their positive or negative feelings. Many books on child rearing do an untold amount of damage because they promote duplicity; they teach parents to act the “proper” responses rather than express their genuine feeling. Ideally, parents would not distort their child’s perception of reality with double messages and reassurances of love at times when the parents are in fact feeling hostile or angry toward him. Similarly, they would not shelter their offspring from the reality of death or illness with false beliefs and the denial of basic existential issues. Instead they would share the happiness and pain of life with their children on a level appropriate to each child’s age. [Robert Firestone, The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses, 1985, The Glendon Association, 1987, pp. 383-384]
Especially important for the nurturing of a child’s self-esteem is the experience of what I have called psychological visibility. …
If I say or do something and you respond in a way that I perceive as congruent in terms of my own behavior … I feel seen and understood by you. I feel visible. In contrast, if I say or do something and you respond in a way that makes no sense to me in terms of my own behavior … I do not feel seen and understood, I feel invisible. …
A child has a natural desire to be seen, heard, understood, and responded to appropriately. To a self that is still forming, this need is particularly urgent. This is one of the reasons a child will look to a parent for a response after taking some action. A child who experiences his or her excitement as good, as a value, but is punished or rebuked for it by adults undergoes a bewildering experience of invisibility and distortion. A child who is praised for “always being an angel” and knows this is not true also experiences invisibility and disorientation. …
If we are to love effectively—whether the object is our child, our mate, or a friend—the ability to provide the experience of visibility is essential. [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, pp. 179-182]
There is perhaps nothing more important to know about children than that they need to make sense out of their experience. In effect, they need to know that the universe is rational—and that human existence is knowable, predictable, and stable. On that foundation, they can build a sense of efficacy; without it, the task is worse than difficult. …
“[S]anity” in family life is one of a child’s most urgent needs if healthy development is to be possible.
What does sanity mean in this context? It means adults who, for the most part, say what they mean and mean what they say. It means rules that are understandable, consistent, and fair. … It means being brought up by parents whose emotional life is more or less graspable and predictable … It means a home in which reality is appropriately acknowledged … It means parents who practice what they preach. Who are willing to admit when they make mistakes and apologize when they know they have been unfair or unreasonable. Who appeal to a child’s wish to understand rather than the wish to avoid pain. Who reward and reinforce consciousness in a child rather than discourage and penalize it. [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, pp. 191-192]
In the end, if children are to acquire competence and character, they need to have sustained relationships with people who care about their intellectual and moral growth. Any improvement in our schools must begin by making sure that these kinds of relationships are available to all students. It must also ensure that teachers have effective conceptual and instructional tools to help them guide their student’s development in the right direction. The instructional relationship between teacher and student is always the place “where the rubber meets the road”: that is, where academic knowledge is communicated, where student curiosity is piqued, where skills and work habits are nurtured, and where lifelong dispositions towards learning are shaped. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 200-201]
Related:
– What do we teach via our character and the environments we create?
– Why might young people dislike school?
– How can parents improve their influence on their children?