To Know As We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey by Parker Palmer (a master teacher offers a new model for authentic teaching and learning)

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To Teach Is to Create a Space....


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To learn is to face transformation.

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To learn the truth is to enter into relationships requiring us to respond as well as initiate, to give as well as take.

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Knowing is a profoundly communal act.

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The conventional pedagogy is not only non-communal but anti-communal. Students are made to compete with one another... in many classrooms cooperation among students goes by the name cheating.

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We become manipulators when education denies and destroys community... Throughout our education we learn to manipulate in order to survive, and then we carry that habit into our postgraduate lives. If we gained knowledge through collaborative, communal process, we would possess a knowledge that could be used in cooperative, not manipulative, ways.

This style of teaching persists because it gives teachers power. With power comes security: the security of controlling the classroom agenda, of avoiding serious challenges to one's authority, of evading the embarrassment of getting lost in territory where one does not know the way home. Teachers are unlikley to relinquish such power even in the face of students who hunger for another way to learn.

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I call the pain that permeates education " the pain of disconnection."

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Real learning does not happen until students are brought into relationship with the teacher, with each other, and with the subject.

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The way we teach depends on the way we think people know; we cannot amend our pedagogy until our epistemology is transformed.

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inquiry vs authority as the center of the classroom....

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There is a knowledge that originates not in curiosity or control but compassion... A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself. The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to live. Here the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing we known and are known as members of one community, and our knowing becomes a way of reweaving that community's bonds.

Curiosity and control create a knowledge that distances us from each other and the world, allowing us to use what we know as a plaything and to play the game by our own self-serving rules. But a knowledge that springs from live will implicate us in the web of life; it will wrap the knower and the known in compassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability.

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How can the places where we learn to know become the places where we also learn to love?

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