My pedagogy is the focus on 3 big questions: what is the universe (and how does it work); what is a human being; and what is the place of that human being in that universe? My focus is on questions, not on answers. My approach is to further the ability of students, individually and in groups, to ask better questions, with more joy. The image is Albert Einstein riding
his bicycle at Caltech. He rose to be Time Magazine's Man of the Century, among the greatest concentration of scientists in Berlin, among whom would be over a dozen who won Nobel Prizes, because he asked the best questions. He played the violin. His hair style and
life style was bohemian. And in the Caltech photos (and the famous photographic portrait taken by my great uncle) he is smiling, on the edge of breaking out in laughter.
Style, like real life, cannot be too precious, controlled or confining. There is a great deal of theory in the Classroom Management Plan of the Future. Not just the minimum of 3 theorists (Dreikurs and the many philosophers and scientific researchers cited), but the tip of an iceberg of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the universe and the human being. But theory alone ill-equips a teacher. What I write here also comes from common sense experience with over 3,000 students, teenagers through over 90 years old, in a dozen different subjects, since 1973. The teacher does not control the classroom. The teacher
does not confine the students to proper instructional attitude. Real life, in the classroom, is messy as well. The techniques of Classroom Management are ways to minimize the mess that will happen regardless of good intentions. The Social Contract is a realistic basis for
encountering the mess, just as the United States Constitution has stood two centuries of messy history. Thus a balance can be achieved of instruction, assessment, and management.
The teacher, in his or her mind, narrates or paints an accurate portrait of minute feelings. The human beings in the classroom are thinkers, yes, but also human because of a full palette of emotions. Adolescent students, going through a "phase transition" in their lives, their brains rewiring themselves, their bodies flooded with hormones, have their social network quivering like a spiderweb shaking in the morning breeze, their sense of belonging to pairs and trios and subgroups in and beyond the classroom under repeated reappraisal. The teacher must respect the dignity of the student, giving attention to the minute variations in feeling, encouraging the positive, enabling the negative to be self- and group-regulated.
As Philosopher of History Samuel P. Huntington writes in his first sentence:
"The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in those qualities."
[Political Order in Changing Societies (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures
Series) (Paperback), by Samuel P. Huntington, 488 pages, Yale
University Press, 1970]
This remarkable and underappreciated book is Hobbesian in outlook and Hegelian in method. That the book is Hobbesian in outlook is indicated by the justly famous opening sentence, and confirmed by Huntington's elaboration of that statement: "The function of government is to govern. A weak government, a government which lacks authority, fails
to perform its function and is immoral in the same sense in which a corrupt judge, a cowardly soldier, or an IGNORANT TEACHER is immoral"
(p. 28, emphasis by Jonathan Vos Post).
Samuel P. Huntington, better known today (and linked to Francis Fukuyama who wrote a new foreword for the 2006 edition) for his theory of the "Clash of Civilizations" goes on to quote Walter Lippman:
"I do know that there is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."
[Walter Lippman, New York Herald Tribune, 10 Dec 1963, p.24, quoted in Huntington, Op. Cit., p. 2]
This Complex Systems Future Classroom Plan is a rough cut of my characterization of a motivational style/approach, informed by art and cutting-edge science, intended to guide the self-government of students asking great questions, and living a life worth living.
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