I talk a lot about engagement, why do I consider it to be so important?

If we are disengaged from our work and that work does not affect another person then that is not good for us, we stagnate, but we are the only ones immediately affected. But if our work involves others and we are disengaged then it means we are treating the others as things, not as persons.

This may seem harsh but think about it for a moment. When we treat the other as a person, we recognise that they are a subjective being, not an object, and as such they have an inner life, they have unfulfilled potentialities.

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“Animals, which do not labour, live in a setting which they cannot transcend … [B]ut human activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis, it is transformation of the world … Human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), p 98 (Penguin edition 2007)

There is no clearer statement for the need to engage in our world and to transform it through cycles of action and reflection. Our young people need this capability and as adults we must model it for them and refrain from being disengaged ourselves.

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What does it mean to be disengaged from our work? It means minimal critical thinking, creativity, or collaboration yet these are the capabilities that we want students to learn. The capabilities that underpin twenty-first-century skills.

When these capabilities are not being modelled by every teacher it is hard for every student to learn them.

About 60% of employees on average are not engaged, which includes employees in education. This latter fact is quite surprising as we humans are social creatures and engaging with colleagues and students, as other humans, will naturally lead to collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.

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With propositional and procedural knowing – knowing what and knowing how, mainstays of post-war education – the educator can be detached. It is better if they are passionate, and many are, but it is the curriculum and the pedagogy which count.

This is not the case with deeper forms of knowing. Emotional intelligence is an expression of perspectival knowing and it is most readily learnt by an adult modelling their emotional intelligence. For a young person to learn to separate what happens to them from the meaning they make from it, it really helps to see an adult modelling how this is done in day-to-day behaviour.

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