Periodically there is a wave of hatred and irony against integrals, primes, hydroxyl groups and Ohm’s law, which are seen as useless, simple Alexandrian words, taught narcissistically and against the real needs of students, which the school ignores.

Many uncritically chewed-up ideas float through the texts and imaginations of those who write or speak about education with more or less understanding of the phenomenon, but few are more debatable than the idea that there are needs that are clearly visible, undeniable, and which can be resolved through good practice. What are the real needs of the student? What are the teacher’s needs? How to make them work together for the benefit of both? Is it enough that educational practice is limited to serving the needs it finds? Do people’s needs always benefit them? Do they conflict or can they cannibalize each other? How do we build a hierarchy of needs? To what extent do they depend on the values ​​adopted by the individual? How to act when these values ​​conflict with the needs of the system and the state that finances it? How do we rank priorities?

I ask all these questions after minimal brainstorming only to subtly point to a more honorable level of complexity than what public opinion usually suggests. Of course, this identifies some real problems: sterile theory, teaching without interest, spirit and curiosity is a problem. Exams that strongly favor mentally ill students are a problem. A system that rewards spiritless ants is a problem. The problem is the amount of information that teachers do not have the courage or openness to adapt to the real conditions of time and learning. But we certainly cannot reduce things to that.

Once, in a discussion on literary topics, the doctor and writer Florin Kirkulescu accidentally uttered a phrase that I had been looking for for a long time. He spoke of the “impoverishment of mental space” due to lack of reading. And then I realized that indeed our mind can be richer or poorer, just as we ourselves can be richer or poorer. And just as the needs of a poor person differ from those of a rich person, so the needs of students can differ depending on many factors, from the level of intelligence to the environment in which they live. Should the educational act simply fully confirm the needs of the student? Or should it focus on building skills that will allow the learner to develop new capabilities over time to ultimately foster a desire for more, better, more? Is it not justified at this point for the teacher to see in the momentary needs of his student mere milestones in the journey to unseen and more offering lands? And doesn’t this mean that the teacher has a radical and terrible duty at certain moments to decide to risk the current needs of his student? Isn’t this why the need for the magisterium has arisen for thousands of years, the need for the pedagogical act to take place in the presence of someone who knows, who has authority, who can decide for his student, and never against him? And aren’t these decisions firmly rooted in the teacher’s values, in his vision of good, evil and the goal of education? Isn’t this what makes a pedagogical decision inseparable from an ethical one? And, last but not least, I ask: isn’t the art of imposing without coercion, giving the student a vision of everything, while giving him a tool for possible parricide, the highest art of pedagogy?

For me, the student’s needs derive from a normative ideal that I assume (at least initially) on his behalf, pursuing his best interests, which I would call an ideal of “spirit” (among other things, what an enormous responsibility to assume! How can my blindness be avoided, my constant temptation by tyranny, my dogmatism, the death of the spirit in the name of the spirit?). From this arise the needs that I will solve during the years when the student will be with me, and of these needs, some will be recognized as such by the student, others will not. The need to know (yes, including what integrals are and what Ohm’s law says), the need to be morally competent, questioning, critical, inquisitive, flexible, consistent, communicative, able to rise from the particular to the general and descend. from the abstract to the concrete, be able to problematize, have aesthetic tastes, be kind to animals and people, be a man of the times without being blinded by crowding, be kind but not stupid, have a backbone, love people more than ideals, know how to choose a bottle wine or have a magical conversation, etc. I could go on for a long time, because “student needs” are constantly generated in a multidimensional space where only intellectual passion will not a series of questionnaires, no matter how well done, will reveal it to us.

This normative ideal has guided my actions and intuition for so long. Yes, as trite as it may sound, the fundamental need of my disciple, the one that gives rise to all others and to which I will constantly strive, sometimes against his will, is to have spirit. And so I fear nothing more than lack of spirituality. And the lack of spirit is also a game with equations in front of students who do not know how to ask themselves anything about reality and who do not know how to allow themselves to wonder about something, but also an individual narrowly and stupidly attached to what adults once decided on the basis of a questionnaire, what are his needs. The greatest enemy of the student’s interests is not integrals or hydroxyl groups. A man of spirit can rebuild the world from here. The greatest enemy of his interests and the worst servant of his needs is indolence. What teachers sometimes show, for whom a tick in the plan is more important than what their student knows and can do. The one that parents sometimes show when they sacrifice the living essence of a student on the pyre of hundreds of hours of thinking and a bunch of preset exam options. The one shown by those who write and think about laws with voting and political clientele in mind, not children. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro