Summary: Quotation of Martin Buber's thoughts (from I and Thou) on the teacher student relationship. Serious food for thought about any educative relationship. It also allows a perspective upon the difference between bureaucratically generated and spiritually processed relationships; intentions, processes, affects and effects are all distinct. Finally, you'll see the irony of the puns (unintended on Buber's part) on the special education term inclusion and on the phrase special education itself.
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The other day Bernice, one the students in a graduate class I am teaching, read between the lines. She commented, "You're an idealist, aren't you" -- or
words to that effect. [She did have to read between the lines because I had been discussing testing procedures and was ticking off the points that a competently written report might cover.]. In response, I said something profound: "Oh [insert long pause and thoughtful look] yeah!". Given that initial response, I thought I'd follow with a serious dip into the sources of my idealism, i.e., this passage from Martin Buber's I and Thou, 1958 edition. [The passages are generally and personally meaningful: (a) it's relevant to any educator's concerns about the meaning and processes of their work and (b) it's powerful: in my own experience this book was, in real part, responsible for my choosing to move from oceanographic studies to becoming a teacher.
The passage stands on its own. It will reverberate more, several orders of magnitude more, if you read the book. At the center of I-Thou is the generation and maintenance of a non-self-serving relationship with beings, large and small, who share the same environment and who also struggle to exist , to eat, to find meaning in this world. The phrase "I and Thou" refers to the special character of relating when generated from the center of a well-tuned, spiritual frame of mind.
In the next question we are no longer concerned with the threshold, the preliminal and the superliminal of mutuality, but with mutuality itself as the door into our existence.
The question is, how is it with the I-Thou relationship between men? Is it alwas entrely reciprocal? Can it always be, may it always be? Is it not--like everything human--delivered up to limitation by our insufficiency, an also placed under limitation by the inner laws of our life together?
The first of these two hindrances is well enough known. From your own glance, day by day, into the eyes which look out in estrangement of your "neighbor" who nevertheless does need you, to the melancholoy of holy men who time and agiain vainly offered the greeat gift--everything tells you that full mutuality is not inherent in men's life together. It is a grace, for which one must always be ready and which one never gains as an assured possession.
Yet there are some I-Thou relationships which in their nature may not unfold to full mutuality if they are to persist in that nature.
Elsewhere I have characterized the relationship of the genuine educator to his pupil as being a relationship of this kind. In order to help the realization of the best potentialities of the pupil's life, the teacher must really mean him as the definite person he is in his potentiality and his actuality; more preceisely, he must not know him as a mere sum of qualities, strivings and inhibitions, he must be aware of him as a whole being and affirm him in this wholeness. but he can only do this if he meets him again and again as his partner in a bipolar situation. And in order that his effect on him may be unified and significant one must also live this situation, again and again, in all its moments not merely from his own end but also from that of his partner: he must prctise the kind of realization which I call inclusion (Umfassung).
But however much depends upon his awakening the I-Thou relationship in the pupil as well--and howeveer much depneds upon the putil, too, meaning and affirming him as the particular person he is -- the special educative relation could not persist if the pupil for is part practised "inclusion," that is, if he lived the teacher's part in the common situation. Whether the I-Thou relationship now comes to an end or assumes the quite different character of a friendship, it is plain that the specifically educative relation as such is denied full mutuality.
[Here we see how Buber sorts the well intended effects of analysis alone (I-It, in his parlance) and what results from the full mutuality created by over-and-over-again revisiting of the I-Thou space.]Another no less illuminating example of the normative limitation of mutuality is presented to us in the relation between a genuine psychotherapist and his patient. If he is satisfied to "analyse" him, i.e. to bring to light unknown factors from his microcosm, and to set to some conscious work in life the energies which have been transformed by such an emergence, then he may be successful in some repair work. At best he may help a soul which is diffused and poor in structure to collect and order itself to some extent.But the real matter, the regeneration of an atrophied personal centre, will not be achieved. This can only be done by one who grasps the buried latent unity of the suffering soul with the great clance of the doctor; and this can only be attained in the person-to-person attitude of a partner, not by the consideration and examination of an object.[italics mine, Spike Hall]. In order that he may coherently further the liberation and actualisation of that unity in a new accord of the person with the world, the psychotherapist, like the educator, must stand again and again not merely at his own pole in the bipolar relation, but also with the strength of present realisation at theh other pole, and experience the effect of his own action. But again, the specific "healing" relation would come to an end the moment the patient thought of, and succeeded in, practising "inclusion" and experiencing the event from the doctor's pole as well. Healing, like educating, is only possible to the one who lives over against the other, and yet is detached. [Martin Buber (1958) I and Thou, 2nd edition, New York: Scribeners, pp 131-133.]
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Others thinking about Buber and Education on the Web
Ruth Wilson
Mark K Smith(in Infed)
