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One of the most valuable practices I use when I teach is to question what is my desire and what is valuable to a student. It is always an interest of mine to see that I have been effective in helping a person to grow, to learn. I like that appearance of learning. It makes me feel good. But too easily, I get caught up in particular outcomes I would like to see. In fact, my work for a particular outcome often stifles the learning that is actually taking place. Learning, I have discovered, happens because a person chooses for himself that learning is valuable - on some occasions for some people, someone else's advice or request is enough to convince them something is valuable to learn, whereas at other times or for other people the desire to learn is independent of or opposite to external expectations and requests. ``Respecting the learner'' means recognizing that a learner may not be in a position to learn what one wants him to learn and being flexible enough to meet him where he is at rather than where one wishes he is. I find that these same rules apply to all kinds of growth - factual, spiritual, or skill growth.
June Singer, in her book Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology, describes a part of the essential relationship that must exist between a therapist and patient. As you will see, this is the same thing I am talking about. School, therapy, and life are not about curriculums or neuroses, but about relationships.
I [recalled] what I had learned in my own analysis when I had been training, shortly after I had begun to work with my first cases under supervision. I was, like all neophytes, exceedingly eager to achieve a successful outcome, and I tended to become quite active in leading, rather than gently guiding the process. My training analyst had gently tried to restrain me, but when that failed she shocked me one day by saying, ``You are not supposed to want the patient to get well!''At first I could not quite believe this, for I surely did not understand her meaning. But gradually as it sank in I was able to see that if I acted out of my desire to heal the patient, I was setting myself up as the miracle worker. I would be doing it for my own satisfaction, for the joy of success, and maybe for the approval of my training analyst. My own needs would be in the foreground then, and the patient's needs would revert to the secondary position. Besides, the possibility for healing lies in the psyche of the patient, the place where the disunion or split exists. The psyche, as Jung has taught, is a self-regulating system, containing within it all the elements which are necessary both to produce a neurosis and to transform the neurosis into a constructively functioning element. If I, as analyst, impose my concepts of the direction into which the analysis should go and what the outcome should be, I am doing violence to the potential unity of the patient's psyche. My task is to use myself as a vehicle for clarifying the patient's dilemmas and for helping him learn to interpret his unconscious production. My task is not to contaminate the analysis with my own problems. And it is for this reason that I constantly need to be aware of my own needs and my own biases.[32]
This is often the same understanding a teacher must have in order to help students become empowered by thinking. Further, Singer's statement explains the critical importance of self-knowledge.
Paul Goodman has suggested that encounter groups be a part of teacher training to meet this need of self-knowledge on the teachers' part. I am certainly wary of forcing anything good on anyone, because it could lose the value it might have had. But I would strongly encourage every person, especially teachers, to pursue self-knowledge.
I may change my mind one day, but right now it is consistent with my experience that a teacher can help to open possibilities for a student, but that sometimes when the student needs to be validated for the poor soul they are, the student cannot also handle encouragement to grow. Learning can be encouraged by teachers once the student has already taken the first step in a particular direction, but it doesn't help for a teacher to force a student to take that first step. Additional complications, of course, arise, such as that often the ``first steps'' are taken in a private world, and only the most gifted teacher can sense them; hence, patience is required so that the first step can lead to the second step to the third step, which might be the first recognizable change in an individual - the first time change can be encouraged. Additionally, these first steps of thinking for oneself are almost inevitably so poorly thought-out that most teachers (including myself) have a tremendous instinct to try and make sure the student will be successful and get the fact or procedure right. But in reality this is one of the teacher's (or therapist's) desires that will not help the student. No matter how stupid the student's genuine thought is, the teacher by changing it risks discouraging the student from being a thinking individual. Most teachers have never experienced another teacher or person being this trusting of them or anyone else and don't realize that the learner will, believe it or not, grow, grow, grow through interaction with the teacher and the world, if only the teacher doesn't insist on it!
I should also note that this kind of effort becomes much easier with a particular student with time, because they will grow to require less and less validation to be confident in learning. In this sense, the difficulty for the teacher is that he must do remedial work for a certain amount of time with almost all students, just so that the students can rediscover their desire to learn.