Summary: Lately, I've been puzzling over the fundamental relationship of teacher and student. How and why does the teacher commit? In this placeholder entry I distinguish between two forms of commitment: the strategic and existential.

We'll treat the legally binding but substantively empty teacher contract as irrelevant to our inspection of the reasons for a substantive decision by the teacher to give over life time. What is relevant in the classroom is the teacher's intentions. Giving over life time (a portion of one's finite number of days) is necessary if the teacher is to nurture into being to some form of potentiality realization [translating a student potentiality into an actuality] on the part of the students s/he has agreed to [attempt to] teach. Strategic commitment is, as far as I can see, an I-It decision-making process which has an analysis preceding the engagement of teacher with students. It looks something like :

So, faced with each of the individuals who have been placed in this class, what is it that I struggle with each to create?

I will be more able to answer this big question if I have the answers to one or two others: i.e.,

a) given what we know about the learner/environment/family now -- what is our the most likely prediction for how each will fit into society,

b) given the same profile what is the highest likely (at least 10% probability) fit with society (highest likely payoff/comfort,respect, accomplishment, pay) and c) what is the 10% probability situation on the low end?

Having answered these questions for each student I can now estimate cost and benefit differences between each scenario and the others. these differences will be useful in determining what instructional (and other nurturant) action should be taken vis-a-vis each child's becoming. My expectation is that the less likely futures will require more effort and ingenuity and, possibly, risk than those with the greatest likelihood of becoming.

This cost-benefit analysis will help the prospective teacher to decide whether her/his life time is adequately compensated for by the combination of pay and the growth that s/he will struggle to bring into being.

There are nonstrategic means for making decisions about commitment. the destiny related process of commitment ofMartin Buber). The process that Buber praises has been seen as existential and spiritual. That there is a difference is, I believe, obvious. (The details of the philosophy will need to be unpacked.)

The free man is he who wills without arbitrary self-will. He believes in reality, that is, he believes in the real solidarity of the real twofold entity I and Thou. He believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of him. It does not keep him in leading-strings, it awaits him, he must go to it, yet does not know where it is to be found. But he knows that he must go out with his whole being. The matter will not turn out according to his decision; but what is to come will come only when he decides on what he is able to will. He must sacrifice his puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to his grand will, which quits defined for destined being. Then he intervenes no more, but at the same time he does not let things merely happen. He listens to what is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desires, in its need of him, to be brought -- with human spirit and deed, human life and death. I said he believes, but that really means he meets.
The self-willed man [the strategic -- I/It thinker. Interp is mine, Spike Hall] does not believe and does not meet. He does not know solidarity of connexion, but ony the feverish world outside and his feverish desire to use it. [sigma]
(Paul Nash,1968, Models of Man, Malibar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, p 438. Quote taken from the 1958 version of I and Thou.)

I am still struggling with this one, I would be lying to say otherwise. But my deep sense is that this kind of commitment [resulting from much soul searching-- not I/it-ing oneself through analysis] is Full and creates a sense of fullness. A jug dipped in the I/It well may look full, may pour a glass to apparent fulness, but it will not satisfy. The glass may as well have been empty for all the good it does for sense of meaning and completeness.