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Relationship

What is the role of relationality in learning?

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I had the joy of working and growing at Sholai school for two years. In the last six months of my time there, three hours every morning was spent on the farm —clearing land, making beds, sowing seeds, collecting mulch, making compost, weeding and watering. What I enjoyed the most was beginning my day with harvesting fresh greens. A close second was stealing tiny carrots and nibbling on them while working. Other memorable days involved getting more drenched than the plants while on watering duty and being reprimanded by a child who said, ‘akka, I told you, you were wrong. Those were not weeds, they were a kind of palak!’

The farm, sacred to Sholai’s educational philosophy, is a place where all of us were students of nature. We learnt about life and death and everything that comes in between — patience, resilience and cooperation. Incidentally, it was on the farm that I felt truly equal to a child for the first time. This feeling, once realised, became an important value to incorporate into my relationship with children inside and outside the classroom.

As Sholai is a residential community, interactions between the teachers and students take place throughout the day. Playing together after school hours, forming reading clubs, eating meals together, washing clothes together and going on treks is part of our lives at Sholai. Through these daily encounters, I learnt the importance of love and care in my role as a teacher as well.

Despite my feelings, I frequently found the need to be firm and authoritative towards children. I could see how the children responded differently to various members in the community. The sweet candidness of some of my relationships with the children would turn into bitter disrespect from time to time.

Imagined Dialogue

I share an imagined conversation with J. Krishnamurti (1) as JK & Alison Gopnik (2) as Alison to think through these questions.
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Q: What kind of relationship is important between teachers and students?

JK: The educator must establish a relationship with a student which is not hierarchical, authoritarian, but a relationship of mutual inquiry, study, sharing, communication, affection, love and security.

Q: Why are affection, love and security important in our relationship with children?

Alison: Childhood and caregiving are two sides of the same coin; children can’t exist without care. By giving an animal a protected early period, a period when its needs are met in a reliable, stable, and unconditional way, you can provide space for mess, variability, and exploration.

Q: What if messiness, variability and exploration leads to children who grow up to feel as though they have ‘failed’ in life?

Alison: A secure, stable childhood allows children to explore, to try entirely new ways of living and being, to take risks. And risks aren’t risks unless they can come out badly. If there isn’t some chance that our children will fail as adults, then we haven’t succeeded as educators. But it’s also true that being a good educator allows children to succeed in ways that we could never have predicted or imagined shaping.

Q: What do we have to change in our own understanding as educators so that we allow children to succeed in ways that we consider ‘failures’?

JK: We have to remove conformity, discipline, rewards and punishment from our relationship with children.

Q: If there is no discipline in a classroom, then would there not be chaos? How can learning happen in such a case?

JK: Discipline is an easy way to control children, but it does not help them to understand the problems involved in living. Some form of compulsion, the discipline of punishment and reward, may be necessary to maintain order and seeming quietness among a large number of students herded together in a classroom; but with the right kind of educator and a small number of students, would any repression, politely called discipline, be required? If the classes are small and the teacher can give their full attention to each child, observing and helping them, then compulsion or domination in any form is obviously unnecessary.

One of the dangers of discipline is that the system becomes more important than the human beings who are enclosed in it. Discipline then becomes a substitute for love, and it is because our hearts are empty that we cling to discipline. Freedom can never come through discipline, through resistance; freedom is not a goal, an end to be achieved. Freedom is at the beginning, not at the end, it is not to be found in some distant ideal.

Q: How can we, as educators, pay full attention to a child and respond accordingly?

JK: If the teacher is of the right kind, they will not depend on a method, but will study each individual pupil. In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them, we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love. If, in such a group, a student persists in disorderliness or is unreasonably mischievous, the educator must inquire into the cause of their misbehaviour, which may be wrong diet, lack of rest, family wrangles, or some hidden fear. If a child tells lies, for example, what value is it to put before them the ideal of truth? One has to find out why they are telling lies.

Q: What if a child is continuously disrespectful?

JK: Sensitivity can never be awakened through compulsion. One may compel a child to be outwardly quiet, but one has not come face to face with that which is making them obstinate, impudent, and so on. Compulsion breeds antagonism and fear. Reward and punishment in any form only make the mind subservient and dull; and if this is what we desire, then education through compulsion is an excellent way to proceed.

Citations

(1). The content for this dialogue was taken from Education and the Significance of Life, chapter 2, the right kind of education

(2). The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik

Thinking Rhizomatically

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