Overview:
Public education often dehumanizes both teachers and students by reducing them to roles and metrics, and calls for a shift toward humanization
When I first entered the classroom at eighteen—as a long-term substitute, a vacancy, a body-to-fill-the-room; so I was hired, so I was told—I carried with me all the freshest and most potent and most upsetting memories of being a student in the same school system. Among them, I remembered how alienating my hunger felt, having never remembered seeing a teacher eat lunch at the same time as me, or with me, or visibly, not from behind a mouth-covering-hand; something to be kept hidden, a flaw in their pedagogy. Indeed, when I entered the cafeteria for the first time, I realized that most of my students, in sixth grade at the time, had never seen a teacher eat before, certainly not amongst them, not from a table at the corner of the cafeteria looking on passively to monitor behavior.
I made a point to exclusively eat my lunch with them, walking around the cafeteria, interacting with them while eating. Very quickly, they began asking me, each day, what I was having for lunch, and I would ask them the same, in response, and, at that point, eating became an act of community between myself and the students, not an aspect of the human condition that we begrudgingly satisfy; not something we must do, but something to look forward to, both for me, the teacher, and the students. Or, to speak more accurately and honestly in our language, it was something to look forward to for all of us as people.
The current system of public education works upon the standard of what bell hooks frequently meditated upon as the objectification of teachers, though, with equal ferocity, it is also the objectification of students, of both, that undertows the entirety of American education. As a student in the public school system, I was struck by the intensity with which my fellow students—and myself, at times, despite so frequently (and desperately) I interacted with my teachers—disregarded the humanity of our educators. Teachers, not as humans, but as these mythic vessels of enlightenment; or, to be more accurate to the current system of public education, vessels of standardized achievement in a series of tests and benchmarks. However, when I entered the schools as a teacher, it struck me, even more terribly, the extent to which my fellow teachers disregarded the humanity of our students. Students, not as humans, but as test takers, as statistics, and reflections of their perceived success in the classroom.
What I noticed, however, is that teachers who most often did not seem to recognize the humanity in their students were not only less recognized for their own humanity, but got little engagement from their students. Schools do not exist in a vacuum for purely educational means. It should go without saying that schools are the primary source of social and emotional support, and the fulfillment of these needs, in many of our students’ lives—furthermore, schools are the source for a great deal of the social and emotional fulfillment in the lives of teachers, as well. So often, it seems the humanity of teachers and students is disregarded in favor of statistical achievement; in a post-millennium educational environment, it is the primary ambition of teachers and of the public school system not to encourage, bolster, and stimulate the intellectual needs of students across the country, but to prepare children, as adequately as possible, to perform at x standard as to best conform to y workplace. Students can tell when they are treated as test scores—if they cannot verbalize it, or make sense of it, feel it they nonetheless can.
Education as a practice of humanization involves, as so much of pedagogy must by nature, a process of unlearning; a reassessment of our approach to education as teachers. For instance, the beginning of a new semester is typically accompanied by a few familiar refrains from teachers, particularly veteran teachers (and those new teachers who are quickly adapting the nihilistic atavism of the school as a workplace), and one sticks out to me the most—stuck out to me, in fact, as a student, as well: respect. The students simply do not respect their teachers, a respect these teachers feel—perhaps not unjustly, or more so understandably—is owed to them.
However, this perspective prevails in education on the grounds of two notions: that children are instilled with a profound admiration of the nuanced challenges and labor which public education requires (they are not), and that children are not human beings, certainly not in the same manner which I, the teacher, am (they are). I am of the opinion that students owe teachers respect; however, students do not owe teachers respect because they are teachers, or because they are adults, or because they have college degrees, they owe teachers respect because they’re fellow human beings. Indeed, the lack of respect students have for teachers is a direct consequence of teachers’ failure to model respect effectively (certainly, I acknowledge the part that the home-front plays here, as well, though control over family structures we, as educators, do not have, and outrage at this reality gets us nowhere; redirect that frustration into praxis). The vast majority of teachers that have both taught me and that I have worked alongside do not enter the classroom with a baseline of respect—real respect, as one would a fellow adult—for their students, and the students feel this. In our failure to treat students as fellow human beings, we create a cycle of objectification: if students are treated as students only, not as fellow human beings, they will create that distinction in their heads as well—not that teachers are fellow human beings, but teachers alone, and nothing else.
Despite the motion that public education has made toward an absurdist simulation of pure intellectual essentialism, a place of transferal between minds only to achieve a standardized goal, no amount of separation of self from the classroom can a teacher do to prevent their role in a child’s life as an adult, a formative figure, quasi-paternal, and a vessel for the fulfillment of their needs; any suggestion otherwise, that it is not the responsibility of teachers to do so, comes from a profound misunderstanding and failure to grasp the purpose of public education at a K-12 level. Consider the body in the classroom.
When was the last time your students saw you or another teacher eating a full meal—not a granola bar or pre-packaged charcuterie—in front of them? When was the last time your students saw you attend to your body’s needs? What do you model when it comes to body image and self care? Are you drinking enough water? Are you eating complete and enriching meals? Are you visiting the bathroom when necessary? (and, if there is not sufficient coverage from your team or administration to do so, have you confronted and communicated this disparity?) When topics such as sex or reproductive wellness are mentioned, do you clench and grow silent and redirect? What may you be teaching them or modeling for students in these reactions, or modelling? To what extent do teachers play in guiding and influencing the shame and guilt of young people when it comes to their bodies? What messages are we communicating to them in our failure to consider ourselves as humans?
Indeed, that is at the heart of objectification in public education; not only that teachers objectify students, and that students objectify teachers, but that both groups are taught implicitly to objectify themselves.
Indeed, that is at the heart of objectification in public education; not only that teachers objectify students, and that students objectify teachers, but that both groups are taught implicitly to objectify themselves. With feminism as a popular and familiar discipline throughout all American culture over the past half-century, it is shocking that conversations around dress code are still as ambivalent as they are, a system so obviously encouraging girls to objectify themselves and teaching boys to objectify them. These behaviors are not inert. The “distraction” that is pleaded to justify dress code on the part of young boys is, as others have pointed out, not entirely honest; no, it seems the “distraction” is on the part of educators and, in implementing dress code, we are teaching young men and boys to not only objectify the girls around them, but to objectify themselves as objects and conduits of desire. Similarly, there is the bathroom problem—yes, while behavioral issues can be acknowledged and should be addressed by a school’s administration, we are encouraging students to disregard their bodily needs in our restriction on bathroom use, and our failure to model healthy bathroom habits ourselves. Returning, once more, to food: by failing to model healthy eating habits (not “healthy” as restrictive, not “healthy” as complicit in diet culture, not “healthy” as encouraging disordered eating, but healthy as eating regular, consistent, well-round meals that are filling, enjoyable, and make the body feel good), teachers play a massive role in encouraging disordered eating; something that, once planted, spreads rapidly among young people.
This is a plight at the forefront of public education—among so much tumult, among an increasingly hostile political order approaching education and the greater strongholds of American culture, it is the recognition of the humanity of our students and of our teachers that will be a great asset to us as educators going forward. The vast majority of our students do not feel heard, do not feel connected with, and, if performance is all you care about, this affects performance, as well. I think, however, that concession in mind, that is part of the dilemma at hand: what are teachers really for? Yes, contributing to an informed and enlightened society is at the forefront of our ambition. However, more than anything—at least, as I see it, in an increasingly depersonalized age where students are dehumanized regularly by algorithms, and will have their humanity disregarded entirely in an increasingly hostile and automated workforce as they enter adulthood—it should be the ambition of teachers not just to be an important, caring, and loving figures in the lives of our students, but provide an example, provide evidence not only of the adults that they can and should strive to become, but the adults that they can and should surround themselves with going forward.
If we want students to be responsive, if we want students to be present in the classroom, we must recognize their humanity, and we must recognize our own. While merely a contextualization, a thesis concerning the practice of education as humanization, hopefully this can be considered as a lens through which one can approach, or reapproach education. An act of mindfulness in the age of chaos and disaster.
