Sometimes, what I call those “you just don’t ask” happenings occur in rapid fire succession. First, there was a simple June 14th FaceBook message from a student who was in class over 20 years ago, part of which read, “I’m at this crossroads….If you have the time I’d love to chat with you.” I made the time. I called. We talked. The next day, as if by kismet, came a David Brook’s New York Times column called “The Building Blocks of Education” that talked about the need to bring back into the classroom emotion that had been driven underground by reason. And finally, Monday, the 20th, there were the parents, whose three sons were in class with me decades ago, who came up to me while Susie and I were at a workshop for her hearing aides. “After all these years, they still talk of how you changed their lives,” the mother said of her sons. All this reminded me of something Elie Wiesel said, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”

After the workshop, when I got home, I put it all together. I went to one passage from Brooks’ column that struck me. Drawing on recent research, the key factor in the classroom, he said, is the unconditional and “essential love between a teacher and a student: the teacher’s willingness to pour time, attention and care into the student.” Love!! He ended his column with these resonating words: “Today we have to fortify the heart if we’re going to educate the mind.” Fortify the heart!!

Reading some of the student’s message to me, I thought to myself, “How true. God, I’ve been ‘writing’ Brooks’ column for years; that has been at the core of my vision; and, that has been the underpinnings for all I have thought, felt, and done for decades. “The heart of education is an education of the heart” and “The absence of heart is the greatest aliment of education.” I went over these sentences time and time and time again. They flashed across my mind in rapid fire like a moving neon banner sign. On that infrastructure, too often shattered into smithereens by far too many academics using the jackhammers of impersonalizing stereotype and generalization, inattention and disinterest, rests faith and hope. It creates such an important enveloping atmosphere needed to be deeply inhaled so schooling and credentialing can be alchemize into education. I looked up above me, taped to a shelf above me was a passage from Proverbs 4:23: “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the springs of life.”

“Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the springs of life.”

Neat words. They mean it’s all about attitude, attitude, attitude. Beliefs have the power to create. But, alas, the building blocks of learning–faith, hope, and love–have been blocked from being used. The power of character of perseverance and curiosity and imagination and optimism, has been dissipated. Emotions, especially self-worth and love, have been driven from the classroom. The requirement of self-esteem has little classroom esteem. To think of love in the classroom is unthinkable. Dealing with debilitating stress is not stressed. The need for connection has been disconnected. Belonging isn’t a consideration that belongs in the classroom. Paying attention to each and every student doesn’t get much of the attention of academics. The mindset messages of how students conceive themselves and their purpose have been set aside and are of no mind to most professors. Grit has been sanded smooth.

We academics are good at academics, at transmitting information, and at credentialing. We are terrible, however, at constructing a necessary character base. That’s what the research findings of Harvard’s Ronald Fryer has said. The gist of this research, supported by the earlier work of Ed Deci, Carol Dweck, Barbara Fredrickson, and others is that you can’t buy or bribe students with rewards and punishments system of grades or GPAs. Students are not really motivated, much less inspired, by what is called these “external motivators.” Reattaching amputated love does. Reconnecting the connection does. Caring about students, unconditionally caring, does. Those emotions, too often driven underground inspire students to care about themselves, to believe in themselves, to have confidence in themselves, to have hope for themselves. Bathing students in love tends to wash away their grimy, isolating and debilitating sense of aloneness, loneliness, and hopelessness. Bathing students in love tends to soothe their anxiety.

So, I argue that an education of the intellect without a comparable education the spirit is both mindless and heartless. It is setting both students up with an inability to deal with mistake and to see error as failure; it is not helping anyone to learn to resiliently regurgitate sadness, anger, and fear. It renders everyone fragile and paralyzed with a sense of worthlessness. The paralyzing anxiety students feel, the atrophying is detrimental to giving and receiving an education. I tell you, from the research and from constant experience, that bathing students in strong connections of love will wash them with senses of belonging, worth, confidence, faith, and hope. Love is the source of attention, of noticing, of valuing unconditionally each student. This doesn’t happen with posters, with sloganeering, or with high-sounding mission statements. It happens with genuine intent resting on genuine perception, unconditional perception, that each student can succeed, that each student is worth caring about, that each student should be noticed, that each student can be creative, imaginative. It happens when each teacher genuinely lives the first tenet of my “Teacher Oath”: “I will give a damn about each person in the class! I will care! I will support! I will encourage! I won’t just mouth it. I will live it! Each day.”

There’s more, but that’s for later.

Louis