On my love for Martin Buber

Over my years in university I have grown very fond of philosophy in general, and of a few authors in particular. Some I have mentioned in these pages (Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and of course Martin Buber himself), some didn’t see their way into my writings this time.

There is however a particular reason why I will never have enough of Martin Buber, a reason that is related to my choice for education as the subject I have been reading, writing and thinking about for the past four years: 

I find his thoughts on education uncommon to the point of being revolutionary, disturbing to the point where they make me doubt all that I have assumed until now, and very inspirational. Needless to say they leave me always wanting more.

He has in fact achieved to make everything that educators have presupposed over the years tremble on their foundations, he has demanded that whoever reads him starts questioning what is to be carried on in every work of education.

Not only does he speak of education, Martin Buber speaks of life. he speaks of what it is that makes life worth living, what it is that constitutes a true, meaningful life-experience, what it is that changes you and the way you see the world forever. 

In this sense, he has helped me to put in perspective the encounters I have had, helped me to give sense to what I have known, to the point where what first brought me uncertainty and doubt, is now my reason to wake up every day.

The encounter with Martin Buber has changed me: I am now more than I was before, and more of what I should be. He has been walking with me on my path for a while, and assisted me to get closer to my goal every day. 

That goal being: I am me. 

Lady Bird

On Buber and the child

When a child is born, two phenomenon’s occur. One is that the child is born with a certain inclination to the history of the world, to the totality of processes in life: he is bound to become what others have been before him, bound to follow a certain order of things.

The other is that on the moment of creation, something unexpected occurs: there is a novelty, a potentiality. It’s the grace of starting over, and then starting over again: with every child that is born there is the hope of a different future, the hope of something new that challenges the fatalities of our world. 

In education, we try to bend this novelty, this potentiality, until it becomes something new, we try to give every new generation the possibility of making unpredictable choices, as they can bring light into the darkness of our world, or they can make it even darker. This is where education intervenes: we try to make the light in the heart of the child stronger. 

I believe this is the only way to see education. Not as a way to adjust the child to the world he was born in, but as a way to change the world within the child, and therefore through the child. 

In fact, one of the reasons for my choice of education as my field of study in the first place, is because of my will, my hope, to contribute a small part to the change of our world. And if that’s what your aiming at, start with the children, as they are the fundaments of our society, they are what holds it together, and what at the same time makes it tremble with every new birth. Every newborn contains the hope of a better world, and it is our duty to carry on that hope, to make sure the child can and will put his print on the world.

Now, Buber claims that the ‘creative genius’ is the highest achievement of human growth. It’s the existence of an creative impuls within every child: he wants to be part of the becoming of things, he wants to be the object of the process of production, because he wants to make sure something is born with him, that wasn’t there before him. It is our job to make this creative impulse grow within the education of the child, because it is our job to welcome and stimulate any novelty within this world. 

But at the same time, we have to acknowledge the fact that it is not education, but the world, that implements the spirit in the child. All we can do is select a part of the broad influence of the world, and show it to the child. But we will never have the same power the world has on the child, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. 

All we can do is make sure the child is strong enough, and has enough creative impulse to stand up against the fatality of the world he is encountering, to encourage the strength within him to make something, so that he can make something happen that could not have happened without him. 

Therefore, education has to start from the contrary of coercion, that is not freedom, but the experience of a bond: a bond with nature, with destiny, with the human kind. If there is coercion in education, there are no bonds. If there is freedom in education, bonds are experienced. These bonds are the constitution of a good start for the child, they light up and disappear, but they have strengthened his heart. 

In my opinion, to make these bonds happen, we have to show what we know of the world to the child. As Hannah Arendt has stated in her essay ‘The crisis in education’, we as educators have to take responsibility for the world, to say: ‘this is what you were born in, this is what we have made of our world’. Only then will the child experience a true bond with his environment, and with us as his educators. And it’s through the bond with us that will generate his creative impulse, his will to make something of his world that was not there before. Later, as he has taken on a personal responsibility of the world, he will be set free from those bonds. He will be a grown-up.

The greatness of the educator lies within the fact that he is continuously taking on new elements, continuously redefining himself and what he teaches, every time he experiences the multiplicity of the child. That’s where the creation occurs. He can not only talk about safe and inherited values, because that would be denying the potentiality of the child to change those values. A true educator is not afraid of uncertainty, of questions and doubts, as it is through those uncertainties, questions and doubts that educations occurs.

To be able to handle this renewing of himself and his values, the educator and the child have to be in a dialogic relationship. This relation is marked by reciprocity, by the knowledge that I affect the child just as much as he affects me. I am present in the child just as much as he is present in me. But what makes the relation between educator and child extraordinary, is that this reciprocity can never be integral: the educator shows a part a the world to the child, but the child is not able to do the same. It is only through this unilateralism that true reciprocity, a true dialogic relationship, can occur. That’s when friendship appears, a connection between two people that are equal in their responsibility of the world.

When one really starts thinking about education and our role as educators, a question rises. Can we base education on our definite vision of the world? And is this desirable? No, it is not. To explain this, we have to ask other questions first. 

One is, what are my convictions regarding the world based upon? These convictions demand a conscious choice, a determination of my reality and my truth, that are based on my experiences. Let’s say I believe black people are bad. This is one of my concrete visions of the world, that is based on my experience of being robbed by a black man in the street.

Another question is, what is the use of my convictions? I use them to give sense to my experiences, to what happens in my life: I have been robbed because I met a black man, that by definition is a bad person.

Now, the reason why it is not desirable to use those personal convictions in education is that the goal of education should be to help the child elaborate his own visions, through the experience of different worlds, not only mine. This is not to carry out individualism, but to carry out love for the one I am educating, and therefore love for the future. In this way, education has to make sure every adult takes his responsibility of the world, takes his own vision of the world seriously, and takes the authenticity of the fundaments education gave him as a basis for his life.

I think we as educators have to take into account the risk of forcing our own visions of the world on the people we are educating. That vision is only our concrete truth, and is not to be generalized. On the contrary, we should teach children that there are many ways to see the world, and that they should take on their own. That is the only way to fulfill the hope we have started with: that these children are going to put into action a series of changes that will maybe, someday, make our world a better place.

True education regards educating the person as a whole, and is not only about the potential knowledge a child can adopt but about everything he is and can become. 

One of the most important features of that education is the education of the character, which Buber sees as the connection between the uniqueness of a person and the succession of his actions and behaviors. Forming that character is one of the most important tasks of the educator, but also one of the most hazardous ones: educating a character cannot be done through lessons about good and evil, about ethos, but only through trust between the educator and his student. The student has to witness the integrity of his educator, has to be shown how this educator lives his life. If that is achieved, the student will start accepting his educator as a real person, not someone who is trying to take profit out of their relation but someone who truly wants to participate in his life. This is what Buber calls the pedagogical encounter: the child comes to me with questions, with doubts about the contradictions of life. My answer on his questions is based upon my conscience, and this is how I help him to become a character that will overcome any contradiction with his actions. I am not afraid to show him the responsibility I have taken of the world, and therefore, he will take on his, based upon all his uniqueness. 

This is what is needed to achieve the true and important relation of two people in responsibility and integrity. 

In this sense, the education of the character is also the education of the community, as it is from the personal uniqueness of every person that the relation between people, and therefore their union, will arise.

Lady Bird 

Geciteerd werk

Buber, Martin, Discorsi sull’ educazione, (2009), Armando Editore, Roma.

Arendt, Hannah, The crisis in education,  (1954).

On Buber and love

The way of love

is the way of no-expectation.

(Osho)

In his book ‘Io e Tu’ Martin Buber talks about the philosophy of the meeting, about how we are created by the fundamental encounter with the other: we were nothing, or only things, before we were brought together. Or in other words, a human being only becomes a human being in the middle of other human beings. 
Once this has been said, it can be no wonder that according to Buber, the love for the other person is our intimate destiny. He believes that in the time we currently live in, we are declined to operate only in the world of It, in the world of things, and to forget about this love for the other person. We tend to reduce our fellow human beings to things, to describe them, analyse them, put them in a certain order. 
But this is nowhere near the world of Me and You, as in that world the other appears in all his uniqueness, he is no longer a thing between things , not a he or a she, not a certain way of being, not someone I know or have experienced, but You, a You that fills the horizon, that has now become my way of looking at the world. In fact, in this relation, I see everything in the light of the other person, he is All and everything exists through him,  by him. There can be nothing between the You and the Me, and this relation exists only in the present. I act on this You as he acts on me, for every relation is reciprocity. The relation has become our way to see the universe, and it’s only through You that I understand the meaning of trees, flowers, or a blue sky. 

In the words of Buber himself: “ What can I experience from You? Nothing, as You cannot be experienced. What can I know from You? All or nothing, as there is no partial knowledge about You.”

I had the chance to meet this You once in my life, not so long ago. I met another human being and through this relationship, I learned how to see him as You, as a being in all his comleteness and uniqueness. I learned to stand in his light and to look at the world through him, to not experience him but to live by the connection we now had. I affected him just as much as he affected me, I acted in him just as much as he acted in me. I didn’t look for this relation, and even though I surrendered myself to it, it wouldn’t have happened without me. I became me by saying You, understood the meaning of this world only in our meeting. I was nothing before, and nothing after, only in our meeting did I exist. 
Some would call this love, and I follow Buber on this matter: love is a fact to be realised, it’s what exists between You and Me, it’s where a human being lives in once he had the chance of this fundamentally deep encounter. Love also means to take on a responsability for the You I’m in a relation with, in fact that’s what defines the evenness between two beings that have love for each other. 
Feelings are only accessory to this love, they are what comes with, what we have, and therefore they can never be what defines our relation. What do defines it is the essence of You, the essence of this being I am now interconnected with. This You can never be the You of any other person but me, for our relation exists only in the present, and only between me and this person I have love for. There can be no third person, as I am the only one who is faced, who is connected, with the strength of the uniqueness of my You. I don’t see parts of my You, no characteristics or features that make him more special than any other, but the wholeness of what he is, not only his soul or his heart but all, and all at once.

This wholeness is what made me put my own safety at risk, what made me go into extremes only to witness the encounter with my You once again. Why don’t I stay in the reality of my life, if that’s what I have to go back to after every meeting? Because in order to live a full life, in order to become a being in the living sense of that word, in order to be more than a thing among things, I have to escape the world of It to make my way to the present, the present of You. That’s the only way to become what I am and want to be. So I packed my things and crossed the Atlantic ocean, to follow the destiny that was put upon me by God and Martin Buber: as I stated before, that destiny being my love for the You I’m encountering.

As I am going on and on about love, an attentive reader could wonder, ‘what about hate’? This is wat Buber states on this topic: For as long as love is blind, and does not see the integrality of the being that is loved, it can never be in the fundamental relation of Me and You. And as hate is bounded to stay blind (you can hate only a part of a being), there is no possibility for hate to enter this relation. From the moment in where one sees the being in his wholeness, that one won’t be able to hate. I myself have never felt much for feelings of hate, and I will agree with Buber that there is no way the same connection can be felt through hate as through love. In fact, this connection is what comes first, but it will never generate hate as it generates love. Once you see the world through the eyes of a You, there is no place for hate.

Buber compares the eyes of Me in the meeting with You with the eyes of a child, a child too young to have any consciousness of himself as a being. He does not see himself as I, and therefore can only respond to the world through a relation of Me and You. That relation is what comes first, is what marks the baby’s first encounter with his universum. An universum that in fact is not his to have yet. Only when he starts knowing, and therefore owning, that universum, and at the same time starts to see himself as an acting subject in the mirror, will het enter the world of It. This derives from the fact that a child, still in the womb of his mother, exists only of this complete, pure and natural connection. That’s what he knows first, and therefore that’s what he will keep looking for all his life. Once born, this child lives from one sleep into the other, in the total reciprocity of the encounter. In that child one can find why we need en keep needing this encounter so much: he stares, scrutinizes his horizon, looks at the babyblue on his wall untill he had understood the essence of that babyblue completely, has a deep contact with his teddybear. Both that babyblue and his teddybear are now a You for the child, even if this You is still immature, innate, an ‘a priori’ for the relationship. 
The last time I spent some time with a child, I was fascinated by the eyes he was able to set on the world. These eyes were full of wonder and astonishment, he looked as if he wanted to swallow everything he saw all at once. There is a reason why they say one should never lose ‘the eyes of a child’, for this means to me that we should never lose the ability of the encounter, of being in a relation between Me and You.

Sadly enough, we live in a world marked with ambiguity, and our attitudes are equally double: we experience the world, learn what things are made of and how they are composed, and through this process we make that world our own. But at the same time we meet the essence and uniqueness of things, and from that moment on a thing is no longer a thing, but a You. 
There is no way, even if we sometimes desire nothing more, to live only in and through this You, as we cannot live only in the present: it would consume us. There is a way to live solely in the past, but that’s not what I like to call life. 
The truth is, one can not live without It. But if he lives only with It, he will never be fully human.

If we look at the history of the world as we know it, the constant evolution of a humanity that is never satisfied, we see that we gain more and more knowledge about nature, which, as we have known since Foucault, translates in power, about all kinds of techniques to produce and reproduce, about social interactions, about the mind and the body, and so on. I tend to see a paradox in this trend, for as we have interactions with our fellow beings that only become richer and more complex, this has as only result that the world of It is growing bigger every day. How can we explain this? 
Those interactions are characterised by the knowledge we cumulate about them, and by the way in which we try to order them: which kind of interaction, with whom, etc. We organize our social life in an attempt to make it clear and manageable, but unfortunately this can never bring us to a true encounter, to a connection with a You: we stay and remain in the world of It, and even if It may be a very significant relationship, it will never be more than a thing, it will never truly affect us. We may have a thousand of relatives, friends and acquaintances, none of them will move us to our core, and we will remain in inertia, not even close to what life could be.

And it’s getting worse, the world of It only grows bigger as we proceed, as we keep gathering little pieces of information on what surrounds us. This is what men call ‘the development of intellectual activity’, which in fact is a development of dead activity. Dead because it will never conceive a state of true living, of fully significant encounters with a You. On the contrary, the world of You is overpowered by all this intellectual, technical and social violence. We think we are getting smarter, while in fact all we do is kill our chances on a real life.

We could say the spirit of the human being is his anwer on the You he is encountering. That spirit stands between You and Me, and the human lives in his spirit if he finds a way to answer his You. But there is a problem here: the stronger his answer gets, the more that answer is holding on to his You untill it will suffocate it. Only silence kan give his You freedom, a presence of his spirit without any manifestation. Every answer would take You to the world of It, and this may be the greatest pain a human being has to deal with in life, it’s the price he pays for his knowledge, his works, his images. 
So in my opinion, we have to learn how to live within our spirit without giving it a voice, we have to find a way to keep this spirit silent, even if all that spirit wants is to cry out how much it was affected by the encounter with You. That spirit wants to know if he can trust the You, wants to be sure if pain isn’t the only thing he will find at the end, wants to say how much it was moved by You. It may be the hardest thing to keep all those voices, all those questions, silent, but it’s worth the try, for this is the only way we can remain in the present of You, and not in the past of memories, that by definition are only things, or in the future of questions, that are still things to become. 
We have to let the present of our encounter with You affect us, we have to jump in head first, and from the moment we start with the questions and the doubts, even if they come directly from what is affected: our spirit, they will kill You, and take it into the world of It.

The world of It is constituted of the absolute sovereignty of causality. Everything that happens has been triggered and is a trigger for something else, and the human being is caught in this ungoing order of things. 
But there is a way to escape this fatal determination, as the human being knows that he not only has the world of It but also the world of You, the world of the relation, in which he can hide from this exhausting causality to be in the freedom and reciprocity of the encounter. In fact, he perpetually goes on between the world of It and the world of You, where destiny and freedom are bounded to one another: only in freedom can one find his destiny, only when released from every causality can one truly be free and will the answer on that freedom appear as his destiny. In this sense, Buber claims that the union between freedom and destiny gives life it’s meaning. 
I found these thoughts significant and inspirational, and they helped me believe that when one follows his path, independent of every order or causality he should pursue, he will eventually find what life has designed for him. If one makes a decision from his deepest essence, not taking any causality or ‘I should’ in account, that one will be freed from the world of It to enter the world of You. Meaningful encounters will follow, and he will start living a true life. 
I think we are all too often caught in a certain order of what life should be: we should finish highschool, we should go to university, we should get married, we should start working; this all being part of the world of It, and therefore this all can never have a real meaning that moves us in the purest sense. All this will never give any significance to our life, will never be what we will recall as the life-changing moments we have witnessed. There is only one should for every human being: he should know the encounter, the present, the You, at least once in his life. 
I had the fortune of running into one of those moments in the past. I suddenly found myself in the present, in the middle of an encounter with a You that chose me, but that would never be without me. It changed my being, but I couldn’t keep my spirit still for very long, and there came the questions: ‘where is this going, what should I do, should I stay here to continue the order of my life as it was designed for me, or should I go and start living my real life, will I get hurt, will I always know this relation in the way it was revealed to me,…’, and there came the world of It. The pain that came along with all this doubts, the pain of discovering that I was in fact not free, but bound to a certain causality, the pain of falling into a existential crisis: ‘who am I? Who will I become?’, would be nothing compared to the pain and uncertainty of leaving everything behind me to follow my destiny, so I stayed and did what everyone expects of me. 
And I was safe but imprisoned. 
Caged into the world of It, that marks more and more our world, our society. That world of It that crushes the human being under a heavy, massive fatality, until that human being believes there is no way out, nothing between voluntary slavery and useless rebellion. But what is in fact deadly for the human being is believing in this fatality, for the world of You is never closed: who approaches it with an open spirit, will find freedom. So I know there is still hope, hope that I will once find the courage to discard myself from causality and to take the decision with all I have in me, and hope that on this moment, my destiny will reveal itself.

After every true encounter, we are not what we were. We have changed, we have received something we didn’t have before: a presence, a presence that at the same time is also a strength. However, this is only possible in true reciprocity. After the encounter with my You, I changed indeed, and I will never be the same as I was before. This can be scary, but it’s also what makes life worthwhile: I am now more than I was, because I have met my You in a certain present, and now I have my memories to recall this one moment of true living.

To conclude these writings, I want to say something about language. Mankind speaks many different languages, and still the spirit knows only one. So when we talk about Io e Tu, Je et Tu, Ich und Du or Me and You, we talk in one and only language: the language of the spirit, of the essence of our being. It’s what Matisyahu, a Jewish reggae singer says in one of his songs: ‘I give myself to You from the essence of my being’.

Lady Bird

Geciteerd werk

Buber, Martin, Je et tu, (1935), éditions Montagne, Paris.

Over opvoeding, onderwijs en 'gewoon-zijn'

Volgens het ‘Panoptisch denken’, zoals door Foucault beschreven,  heeft de mens geleerd om zich aan te passen aan een bepaalde orde, om te bekijken en bekeken te worden, om zichzelf en anderen voortdurend te willen verbeteren, om bepaalde lichaamshoudingen aan te nemen en zich zo te onderwerpen aan een bepaalde macht die aanhoudend op hem inwerkt en waarvoor geen uitweg lijkt te zijn. Deze disciplinaire macht is gerelateerd aan een bepaalde logica, die ik hier als ‘de Ratio’ zou willen benoemen. We zijn sinds de Verlichting misschien wel kritische en rationeel denkende wezens, maar dit denken is nooit vrij, is steeds aan bepaalde voorwaarden gekoppeld. Impliciet werd bepaald hoe onze ratio er dan wel moet uitzien, wat wel en niet toegelaten kan worden om de, zo lijkt het, eeuwige orde te behouden. Tegelijk werd deze orde en logica, deze Ratio, heden verbonden aan een economisch denken; aan het steeds in acht nemen van wat het meeste opbrengt, waaruit de meeste winst gehaald kan worden, hoe men op zijn best en voortdurend kan presteren.

Dit ‘Panoptisch denken’ en deze disciplinaire macht zijn zichtbaar in het onderwijs zoals we het nu organiseren, voor wie de moeite neemt dit onderwijs te tonen, in het licht te stellen, te bevragen.  Zo kan men het panopticum, het zien en gezien worden en het zich dus steeds bekeken voelen, aan verbetering onderhevig, terugvinden in de manier waarop de speelplaats begrepen en ingericht wordt. In bijna alle gevallen gaat het om een lege ruimte, omringd door gebouwen, en niet zelden zo opgesteld dat de lerarenkamer er zicht op heeft. Ook een bepaalde orde, gebaseerd op wat het meest rendeert, het meeste winst opbrengt, is doorgedrongen tot in de kleinste klasjes van elke school. Het minutieus bepalen waarvoor elk moment zal dienen, of het nu les, spelen, of eten is, het steeds zicht hebben op waar de leerlingen zich bevinden en wat ze aan het doen zijn, het vergelijken van klasgemiddeldes en het vermelden op rapporten op welke plaats in de ranking der resultaten een leerling zich geplaatst heeft, vallen hierbij te vermelden.

Alsook wordt een bepaalde lichaamshouding van de leerlingen verwacht, een bepaalde onderwerping van het lichaam aan de macht die het onderwijs welbeschouwd is. Dit is naar mijn mening het best zichtbaar, naast in het urenlang stil blijven zitten aan netjes in rijen opgestelde banken, in de kinesitherapie die men vaak voorschrijft aan leerlingen met leerstoornissen, leerlingen bij wie de onderwerping, de aanpassing, niet van een leien dakje gaat. Deze leerlingen worden geholpen om de onderwerping toch mogelijk te maken, om de lichaamshouding die ze moeten aannemen, willen ze slagen in hun schoolloopbaan, er toch ‘in’ te krijgen, zodat ze gaan denken dat zij het ook zo willen, dat het niet anders kan, tot de macht een inwendige configuratie (Foucault, 1979) geworden is. Een modificatie  van het zijn dat niet zelden pijn doet.

Zo wordt de disciplinaire macht uiteindelijk niet opleggend of onderdrukkend maar sturend, een bepaalde werkzaamheid, die bepaalt hoe we naar onszelf en naar anderen kijken, welke soort vrijheid we willen, wat vrijheid voor ons is. En om ons daarbij te helpen, is steeds een ‘herder’ aanwezig, een leider van mensen, leerlingen, werknemers, die ervoor zorgt dat we ons goed voelen, die onze welzijn steeds in acht neemt, die het beste met ons voorheeft. Deze herder wordt vaak leerkracht, werkleider, personeelsmanager genoemd.  Zo wordt vrij zijn erbij horen, zich aanvaard voelen in de groep, meedenken met wat de ‘publieke opinie’ ons voorschrijft. Zo wordt vrij zijn niet gewoon doen maar ‘mee-doen’. Dit is wat Foucault (1979) met ‘pastorale macht’ aangeduid heeft.

Onze maatschappij kan als een controlemaatschappij gedefinieerd worden  waar we niet buiten kunnen, er is namelijk geen ‘buiten’. Gezien en geregistreerd worden is steeds mogelijk, waar men zich ook beweegt, welke schuilplek men ook opzoekt. We kunnen dan ook de orde, de logica en de Ratio nooit uitsluiten, we gaan maar door met onszelf beter te leren kennen, verder te ontwikkelen, met economische, maar ook intellectuele en persoonlijke winst te maken.  Getuigen en gevolgen daarvan zijn het succes van praatgroepen, de onstuitbare groei van de voorraad zelfhulpboeken, en het zich onophoudelijk uitbreiden van het bijscholingsaanbod. We kregen de ruimte om bewust en kritisch nadenkend, om rationeel te zijn ,maar verloren daarbij de ruimte om ‘gewoon’ te zijn. Er moet steeds meer, en steeds langer, tot uiteindelijk alle segmenten van het leven doordrongen zijn met wat moet, wat verwacht wordt te zijn, wat beter kan.  Daarbij vervaagt het onderscheid tussen wat privaat en wat publiek is (Sennet, 1978), een verschuiving  die de doctrines van ‘wat moet’, alleen maar meer zijnskracht geeft. Zo beoordelen we politici op hun privéleven, waaruit volgt dat ze ten allen tijde ‘sympathiek’ voor de dagen moeten komen.  Zo wordt ons steeds meer, en van jongs af aan, duidelijk gemaakt hoe ons liefdesleven, onze seksuele leven, eruit moet zien, wat wel en niet kan, waaraan we moeten voldoen om van een ‘bevredigend seksleven’ te kunnen spreken, aan de hand van vrouwenbladen, tv-programma’s en het uitgeven van de boeken van zogenaamde ‘seksuologen’  die ons aanmanen meer van het ene en minder van het andere te doen, meer van het ene en minder van het andere te zijn. Zo worden steeds meer gebouwen opgetrokken waarvan de wanden uit glas bestaan, zo worden stations, kantoorgebouwen en scholen transparant, doorzien-baar,  zo worden we ons elke dag meer bewust van hoe onderworpen we zijn aan zichtbaarheid, beoordeling, verbetering.  En de school als instelling doet hier lustig aan mee (Simons & Masschelein, 2008), een school is nu geen school meer maar een ‘contextrijke leeromgeving’, met aandacht voor het Individuele Kind, met differentiatie en individuele leertrajecten, met zorgklassen en onthaalklassen, en zelfs ‘kangoeroeklassen’ voor hoogbegaafde kinderen. Het ‘filosoferen met kinderen’, of Philosophy for Children (P4C, VanderLeeuw, 2009) zoals dit modebewust geduid wordt, doet aan deze houding, deze ethos, geen afbreuk, integendeel. Het is een wolf in schaapsvacht, een praktijk die de machtsvormen, hierboven beschreven, eens te meer ondersteunt. Zelfreflectie en onderzoek wordt nu ook aan de kleinste kinderen opgelegd, een zogenaamde ‘vrije’ vorm ervan, maar waarvan de doelen toch steeds op voorhand vast liggen. En zo kunnen kinderen steeds minder ‘gewoon zijn’. En zo is er steeds minder ruimte voor het ‘on-verwachte’, het ‘on-voorspelbare’.

 Ook als de schoolbel het einde van de dag inluidt houdt het niet op, en wat vroeger het gezin en de hobby’s waren, zijn geworden tot ‘leeromgeving’. Het stopt nooit, en de druk wordt steeds meer opgevoerd. Het constante presteren en het zichzelf bewijzen, de onzekerheid, de normen waaraan men steeds moet voldoen, ondanks de aandacht en het respect voor ‘eigenheid en verschil’, de orde die nooit ophoudt te zijn, er te zijn, dat is waar we kinderen heden aan onderwerpen. Dit is waarom het vele leerlingen te veel wordt, waarom de stress van het voortdurende ‘moeten’ hen zo ondermijnt dat ze schoolmoe, zelfs schoolziek worden, waarom sommigen op zoek gaan naar de grens van het ‘moeten’, die er niet lijkt te zijn. Waarom anderen ervoor kiezen naast de maatschappij te vallen,  en zo weigeren deel te nemen aan een samenleving die gebouwd lijkt op controle, op discipline, op ‘moeten’, niet omdat dit hen gelukkig zal maken maar omdat het nu eenmaal kiezen tussen tweede kwaden lijkt te zijn.

Is er dan geen uitweg? Kan het onderwijs anders bedacht worden, en hoe?  Kan de school als ‘leergemeenschap’ opengebroken worden, zodat het opnieuw kan bewegen en zichzelf kan vernieuwen?

Na het stap-experiment, na de ervaring zoals het zich aan me voordeed en het gehele denk- en schrijfproces die erop volgde, is het naar mijn mening juist in het opzoeken van grensgebieden dat een uitkomst zich verschuilt. Het opzoeken van grensgebieden en je hier aan durven blootstellen, je laten raken door wat aan je verschijnt, door wat niet verwacht en niet voorzien was; deze onzekerheid durven omarmen, ze misschien zelfs opzoeken. De zaak de zaak laten zijn, en daarbij als leerkracht aandachtig en gepassioneerd met deze zaak bezig zijn. Ergens durven zijn, en blijven zijn.  Het gaat om een andere soort pedagogiek, een pedagogiek van het ‘gaan’, de wereld durven betreden, jezelf als opvoeder en pedagoog in een oncomfortabele positie durven plaatsen (Masschelein, 2006).  Een pedagogiek van het kijken, en het blijven kijken, van ergens door aanhoudende aandacht, door passie voor een zaak, ‘in’ te komen.  Deze fundamenteel verschillende houding, deze ethos, dit risico die we moeten durven aangaan, snijdt in hoe we zijn en hoe we leven; we komen er veranderd uit doordat we ruimte laten voor wat nog-niet-is, voor wat kan-zijn. Het gaat om het laten zijn van de ruimte, het geconcentreerd doen van wat de zaak vraagt (Vansieleghem, 2010).

Ook ik kwam veranderd uit mijn experiment, en ook bij mij hield dit een risico in, een onaangenaam gevoel van iets doen, en niet weten of je het ‘goed’ doet, niet weten of het dat wel is dat beoogd wordt, of er wel iets beoogd wordt. Maar het is naar mijn mening juist in die ervaring dat een uitweg uit onze allesomvattende controlemaatschappij besloten ligt. Ik deed, en ik deed ‘gewoon’, ik liet me leiden door wat de zaak, de ruimte, van mij vroeg, ondanks de onwetendheid over wat de uitkomst hiervan ging zijn. Ik ‘liet-gebeuren’, ook toen die onzekerheid me bijna tot wanhoop dreef. Het resultaat van zo’n oefening is altijd onverwacht, onvoorspelbaar. Het vergt inspanning en aandacht, wilskracht en betrokkenheid. Maar zo’n opstelling, waarbij we als pedagogen de openheid hebben om ons te laten verrassen door wat ‘is’, door wat ‘kan zijn’, loont altijd de moeite.

Als we dit kunnen bereiken, als we erin slagen de doctrines van ‘wat moet’ op te geven, om wat is, te ‘laten zijn’, dan kunnen we misschien teweegbrengen wat we allen voor ogen hadden bij aanvang van onze studie, iets dat we nu steeds meer vergeten lijken te zijn; en kunnen we trachten van deze samenleving, via het onderwijs, een meer menselijke plek te maken, een plek waar je ook gewoon mag ‘zijn’.

Lady Bird

Geciteerde werken 

Foucault, M. (1981). ‘Discipline’. In Te Elfder Ure 29, p. 588-622. [Samenvatting van het hoofdstuk ‘Discipline’ uit: Discipline, toezicht en straf.]

Foucault, M. (1979). ‘Omnes et singulatim: Towards a criticism of political reason’. http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.omnesEtSingulatim.en.html

Deleuze, G. (1990/2006). ‘Naschrift bij controlemaatschappijen’. De Witte Raaf, 119.

Sennet, R. (1978). ‘The public domain’. In The fall of the public man. (London: Penguin Books). P. 3-27.

Masschelein, J. (2006). ‘Laat ons gaan’. In Masschelein, J. en Simons, M. (red.) Europa anno 2006. Educatieve berichten uit niemandsland. (p. 35-44).

Simons, M. en Masschelein, J. (2008). ‘From schools to learning environments: the dark side of being exceptional’. Journal of Philosophy of education, 42. P. 3-4.

Van der Leeuw, K. (2009). ‘Philosophy for children as educational reform’. In Marsal, E., Dobashi, T., Weber, B. (Ed.) Children philosophize worldwile. Theoretical and practical concepts. (Frankfurt, Peter Lang). p. 111-127.

Vansieleghem, N. (draft) ‘Become who you are! On the care of the (psychological) self’.

Vansieleghem, N. (2010). ‘What is philosophy with children? From an educational experiment to experimental education’.