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).