6  Honouring the ineffable, sacred, mystical centre – as everyday teaching experience

Caring, creativity and criticality, I have argued, represent the three primary modes of engagement, engagement that is of the human spirit with the world-at-large, or with the self.   The three are the three primary colours of the interior self, of the human spirit.   We can think of these three as a split light from a prism.   Diagrammatically we could also see the three as over-lapping circles. 

I have talked about the input for the creative – the arts and aesthetic experience, with special reference to poetry and story.  I have talked about input for the caring – higher-order values.   Higher-order values in schools come in three ways a) the way the process is conducted that is the rules of process and whether or not the teacher walks the talk, b) the content chosen for study and c) the values and ethos of the school as a whole e.g. the Catholic sources in a Roman Catholic school, its Assemblies etc.  

I should now mention briefly the third input ‘philosophical inquiry’, that which develops criticality, and the star in this case is a man called Professor Matthew Lipman.

Mathew Lipman and his Philosophy for Children programme

Professor Matthew Lipman of Montclair College New Jersey taught me the value of philosophical dialogue, in the long line of such teaching from the great Socrates.   He is certainly one that you might want to place in your ‘starry firmament’.    Lipman with Ann-Margaret Sharp his chief collaborator, and others, has been developing his ‘Philosophy for Children’ programme for more than two and a half decades.    He was honoured by the US government, and he continues to be ignored, as is the way of things, by the vast majority of his fellow countrymen.

Lipman was professor of philosophy at Columbia University.  He thought philosophy too important to be left  to the elite called philosophers.  Consequently he left his high status job and went to a small college, Montclair,  There over two and a half decades he has been developing his Philosophy for Children programme, which is now used in many parts of the world, including Mexico. 

Lipman said if you want reasoning and reasonable graduates of the education system you must teach them to be reasoning and reasonable BY BEING reasoning and reasonable.  That is to say, the process must walk the talk.

He claims, and I have found it to be completely true, that children love the kind of things that philosophers love.  The disadvantage, that normally keeps children and philosophy away from each other until say 16 or 18 years of age is the supposition that they have not sufficient command of abstract language.  Lipman’s stroke of genius was to create stories, stories that are richly embedded with possibilities for philosophising.    The process is simple at one level – text – generation of questions by the children – philosophical discussion.   That’s it. However there is a difference between waving a sword around and being a Samurai swordsman.

PFC, well done, is a masterful process for one of the three primary colours of the human spirit; criticality.

Human expression as an infinite admixture of the three primary colours caring, creativity and criticality

Diagrammatically the three modes of engagement overlap, the colours mix into an infinity of hues in each individual human expression, be it primarily a caring expression, a creative expression or an expression of criticality.   Whatever the metaphor,  from the centre comes the possibility for the ineffable, the sacred, the mystical - for at the centre is the well-spring of human possibility.   This is true of the centre of the person in the case of individuals, but here I am speaking also of the centre of keeping these three yoked together in dynamic interplay – the three horseman, of caring, creativity and criticality.  

And, if not too much ego is getting in the way, there is the possibility of what the Baha’is call, “Breaths of the Holy Spirit, that is the immanent God is experienced as in the statement from the Hidden Words by Baha’u’llah;

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.             (Baha'u'llah:  Arabic Hidden Words, p. 13)

 In moments of sublime attunement we feel the presence of God.  What I am saying is that this is possible through this way of teaching, not just through personal spiritual discipline.

Diagrammatically where caring, creativity and criticality overlap, in the no-man’s territory we might say, there in that central domain is where the possibility for the ineffable, sacred, mystical, aesthetical experience arises – at least in my experience of teaching not just children but adults as well, and good learning for adults is healing as well as extending or entertaining.  

Here I must mention briefly the view of the teacher-class relationship as consisting of multi-level dialogue.   One level of dialogue is that of philosophical inquiry.   A second level of dialogue is with individual pupils, part of which is overt, part of which is tacit.  A third level is at the level of prayer and meditation, as a vehicle of the love the teacher has for those s/he is teaching.   A fourth level is very deep and emerges as symbols, and what ‘just pops into the mind’, e.g. in other forms of dialogue.  An illustration of this exists in the lessons I videoed in which I was seeking to extend the understanding of  a class of 12-13 year olds understanding of the nature of  story.   In the middle of the first recorded lesson of philosophical dialogue for some reason I went to the board and drew two fishes.   One was a line drawing of a fish.  The other was a fish, of similar shape, delineated by shading all around.  I asked the class to consider what relevance if any the drawings might have to the discussion we were having.   No answer came about that, but other contributions came on other lines that were being followed.    Then a particular boy gave his view.   This boy was one who was frequently in trouble with teachers, occasionally with me, and whose work was not well done and not of a very high standard.  This is what he said.  “Mr Prentice I think the line drawing version represents bounded imagination.  The other drawing represents unbounded imagination.”   Now, of course, this was a stunning, deeply insightful comment and an example of what I want to say about the closeness of thought and spirit in dialogue that is really working, and I here speak of philosophical dialogue.  When it is really working well it is as if the pupils minds and the teacher’s mind have become one.  This of course is a kind of transcendent experience where the known and knowable and the ineffable and sacred are present in dynamic relationship. 

It will probably not come as a surprise for me to tell you that I was a teacher of English.   Within that specialist discipline I applied my SunWALK model.   After philosophical inquiry I would ask the pupils to do creative work and then more philosophical inquiry and so on. The session that threw up the fishes and the penetrating comment from the ‘deviant’ boy was part of several weeks work with 12 to 13 year olds on story criticism and writing.   As a text I used one sentence, by an Italian writer who claimed to have written the shortest story in the world.   Here it is, please don’t cough or you’ll miss it;

“When I woke up the dinosaur was still there.”

 Did someone cough – now I’ll have to read the whole thing again… The classes argued for lesson after lesson on everything from the inadequacy of the story against teacher expectation, or what they understood to be the defining characteristics of a story to in depth discussion of whether meaning was in the marks on the page or in the act of reading.    I didn’t know they knew all that.   They didn’t know they knew all that.   Without philosophical inquiry the potential, the tacit, would not have been manifested.   Philosophical inquiry, then creative writing, then, using the products of the creativity, do more inquiry – left-brain then right brain then left-brain, all in the presence of heart –centredness and respect

This is the key to this most powerful way to teach, back and forth howsoever many times are appropriate.   The switching back and forth can be from day to day or even from 10 mins to 10 mins.   Neither the creativity nor the philosophical inquiry is sufficient in themselves – which is why I am committed to holistic education, above philosophical inquiry, even whilst I recognise PFC  as the great teaching process of the 20thC .   Even though Matthew Lipman has shown us how to teach better than Socrates, philosophy on its own can never be enough because it never leaves the left-brain.  Like yin and yang, philosophy and poetry, need each other.   And they also both need an ethos, and process and content, that expresses higher-order values. 

We can explore more of this on Friday in the workshop, or outside of sessions.