Teaching in the Age of Coronavirus
by Douglas Gerwin
In teaching high school students, I encounter fewer cases of truculent teenagers who say, “I won’t!” and many more cases of trepid students who say, “I can’t.” We have entered an age of heightened mental and emotional––to some extent even physical––paralysis.
More than a century ago, Rudolf Steiner predicted we would be living in an age of ever heightened anxiety. “Everywhere,” he told a German audience some six years before the outbreak of the Spanish flu epidemic, “something like nervousness is present. All this will, in the near future, grow worse and worse . . . . For there are harmful influences that affect our current life in a quite extraordinary way and that carry over from one person to the other like an epidemic.”[1]
Today, even more all-encompassing than the current pandemic attributed to ever new strains of the coronavirus, we live in an atmosphere of nameless anxiety that exacerbates in our students––as in ourselves––a stifling stenosis of soul.
In this context, we need to ask: Given that teenagers are growing up in an age of societal anxiety––a condition intensified, we now know, by the use of smart phones and the Internet––how are they to be educated? And how best to prepare their teachers to educate them?
Stirring movement from within
Step for a moment into the shoes of a student and you will recognize that, if you are suffering an intensified state of stress or anxiety, you will probably be unwilling, or simply unable, to learn anything new. Cramming for a high school test represents an archetypal example of this condition. While feeling the pressure to organize and retain what you have been told, it is simply too risky to explore an unfamiliar perspective or be open to the epiphany of new insight. Instead, we hear students call out, “Will this be on the test?”
To put it more generally, when students feel anxious, they won’t move. And yet moving––whether outwardly in physical activity or inwardly in soul and spirit––lies at the fundament of all learning.
We can say, therefore, that in educating teenagers (younger children, too) we need first to make sure they move. But here’s the rub: whatever pressure an adult exerts on a student from without will inevitably create anxiety in that student, who will feel––rightly––the alien source of this pressure. Though in younger years children need to be steered towards healthy situations and protected from harmful ones, by the time they are young adults movement needs to arise from within, not be induced from without.
In the end, all healthy movement arises from within, even if it is initially stimulated from without. This is the secret of the free human will, easily overlooked because clouded in unconsciousness and, among younger children, still largely undeveloped. With the exception of the reflex––an autonomic (and hence entirely unfree) reaction to the stimulation of the nervous system––healthy movement originates from within the human being, even if it is in response to outer guidance. And only when the kid moves will the kid learn.
By the same token, as children grow into teenagers, loving guidance administered from without must give way to inner self-direction if something is to be regarded as truly “learned”. As we know from struggling to ride a bicycle, you cannot claim to have learned the skill of balancing if your training wheels are still attached.
Three roles for a high school teacher
Though the development of this inner self-direction is gradual, by the time of adolescence it holds the key to a successful high school education. And yet no age group is more prone to paralysis born of anxiety than is puberty. For this reason, teachers need to stir their students into movement in three distinct yet related ways, embodying what I will call the “3PC’s” of the high school educator:
Teacher as pedagogical coach
Teacher as pedagogical counselor
Teacher as pedagogical compass
As pedagogical coach, a teacher deals with how to develop practical skills, helping teenagers find purpose in work and confidence in conducting themselves in the world. This is why, in high school, the most trusted teachers are often those who can tell you how to do something by yourself. Drivers ed. instructors, gym and athletic coaches, practical arts instructors, computer techies, nurses and medics, kitchen staff: these are the faculty and staff members who may most easily garner a teenager’s respect.
As pedagogical counselor (not to be confused with psychological therapist), a teacher deals with how to handle feelings, or more precisely how to sort out the confused skein of human sentiments that so easily tie teenagers up in paralyzing emotional knots. Good counselors know to use feelings as opportunities for learning; to pose questions rather than supply answers; to jointly come up with strategies rather than provide ready-made solutions.
As pedagogical compass, a teacher deals with how to think, but again not by providing answers but rather by helping students develop leading questions that will help them discover uncharted terrains for themselves. A good compass indicates direction quietly and steadily, all the while vibrating slightly and adjusting constantly on an acute needle point to changes in orientation.
In all three roles, the teacher’s secret to success is to educate by stirring the student to move, whether that movement is physical or bodily, psychological or emotional, spiritual or mental. The teacher sets up the conditions in which the student can dare to try, to fail, to learn, and in this way to become motivated increasingly from within –– eventually free, one hopes, of outer prodding.
However, as they say, “Charity begins at home.” In the context of high school teacher training (indeed, one could say this of all educators), teachers learn best how to move their students by first learning to move in new and perhaps unfamiliar ways themselves. So it is, then, that prospective and practicing teachers coming into the Waldorf training program launched a quarter-century ago in New Hampshire spend fully 50% of their time in all manner of movement: physically in eurythmy and Spacial Dynamics, psychologically through other performing and also fine arts, spiritually through the engagement in what Rudolf Steiner described as “living thinking” or “formative thinking”, distinct from what he termed “dead thinking” or what one of my high school colleagues names “thunking”.
Aristotle asserts that all learning begins in mimesis. On this view, students coached and counseled by educators who themselves embody these kinds of movement are more likely to imitate the striving of their teachers. When teenagers begin to move, they begin to educate themselves. And in educating themselves, they gain the confidence needed to loosen the contemporary paralysis of anxiety.
[1] Rudolf Steiner, “Overcoming Nervousness”, Munich, 11 January 1912, GA 143, in Anthroposophy in Everyday Life (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1995), p. 31.