Nouwen on Teachers and Schools

Not only in the relationship between parents and their children but also in those between teachers and their students, hospitality can be seen as a model for a creative interchange between people. If there is any area that needs a new spirit, a redemptive and liberating spirituality, it is the area of education in which so many people spend their lives, or at least crucial parts of their lives, as students or teachers or both. One of the greatest tragedies of our culture is that millions of young people spend many hours, days, weeks, and years listening to lectures, reading books and writing papers with a constantly increasing resistance. This has become such a widespread phenomenon that teachers on all levels, from grade school to graduate school, are complimented and praised when they can get the attention of their students and motivate them to do their work. Practically ever student perceives his education as a long endless row of obligations to be fulfilled. If there is any culture that has succeeded in killing the natural spontaneous curiosity of people and dulling the human desire to know, it is our technocratic society.
As teachers, we have even become insensitive to the ridiculous situation in which adult men and women feel that they "owe" us a paper of at least twenty pages. We have lost our sense of surprise when men and women who are taking courses about questions of life and death anxiously ask us how much is "required." Instead of spending a number of free years searching for the value and meaning of our human existence with the help of others who expressed their own experiences in word or writing, most students are constantly trying to "earn" credits, degrees and awards, willing to sacrifice even their own growth.
In such a climate it is not surprising that an enormous resistance to learning develops and that much real mental and emotional development is inhibited by an education situation in which students perceive their teachers more as demanding bosses than as guides in their search for knowledge and understanding.