A pathway opens!

We need to develop the adults to fully develop young people

Last week I brought together the ideas that for us to get unstuck (politically) we need many more adults with the capacity to reimagine and enact new social and economic arrangements (a fourth-person perspective) and, that left unconstrained, young people would reach this level of capability by their mid-twenties, surpassing most current adults.

At the same time, society still needs continuity in its technologies and institutions – there is still a need for electricians and engineers, doctors and nurses, beauticians and train drivers.  There is still the need for transmission from adult to child in the sense of knowledge and skills, but the transmission from child to adult is to afford the capacity to question the validity of current social and economic arrangements, and the modelling of new identities that are suited to an emerging new world.

Eventually, when the young people reach the mature fourth-person perspective (their mid-twenties) they can fully re-imagine new social arrangements and, collectively, begin to put them into practice. We could say that youth culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s saw the problems but could not sufficiently well re-imagine how things could be different nor enact them, nor what identities they would need to take on to achieve substantive change.

The teacher taxonomy I developed in Why We Teach seems to match the three cultures as described by Mead.  Competent teachers very clearly align with the postfigurative culture.  How such teachers behave is the way they expect students to behave and are frustrated when they don’t, attempting to enforce compliance through positional or personal authority.

Motivated teachers match with the cofigurative culture, they treat students as equals, but it is still their open, self-awareness that they see as being what their students should be modelling themselves on, and the transmission of propositional and procedural knowledge without being properly underpinned by deeper forms of knowing still predominates.  The idea that students should be creating a new world – for which they need new capabilities - has not yet dawned upon them.  As such this is a transitory phase.

It is the Enlightened teachers who create the possibility for students to form an identity and determinations about the future which are free of, that is unconstrained by, the teacher’s own behaviour and beliefs.

Competent teachers were a stable group in the past, Motivated teachers reflect the transitional set of behaviours that lead into the new stable group - Enlightened teachers.  Thus, a pathway for teacher professional development becomes discernible.

And therefore actionable.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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