Teacher or Educator?

    The best way for you or me to meet Maria Montessori today is not by doing a Google search on her name or by checking out what they have about her on WIKIPEDIA or even by reading some of her many books – no, the best way to meet Maria today is in the personal discovering of this child – in comforting, reassuring, nurturing this boy or girl here and now before us. Having been a Montessorian for fifty years, I am convinced that my vocation as parent and as educator has been and still is to truly recognize the dignity, the individuality, the unique value of every child in my care there for me to love and serve in this here, in this very now.


    Teacher or Educator? Does it really matter which? I believe so. Teaching is the skill training of groups of people for some purpose – perhaps a necessary one like turning out productive citizens or soldiers – but educating is neither about groups nor about directly teaching anything. Educating is the indirect helping of a child one at a time in his or her self-development of becoming a person. Teaching is focused on numbers and statistics – on groups being prepared for some future. Educating is about developing the human potentials of each child – potentials that contain the natural skills needed to succeed at this challenge before him or her in this present moment. Teaching is the training of a set of skills for tomorrow. It is practice this for some distant that. Educating is all about assisting the natural empowerment of a person for today. It is life answering life. Teaching requires us to visualize children as abstractions – as “second graders” – and instructs the teacher to act as a trainer. The act of educating requires us to observe children as unique individuals and calls upon us as educators to reverently lift up this singular child and proclaim: “See! There is life here wanting more life! Right here! Right now!”


    Let me give you an example. Mostly these days I am with children to tell them a story, and when I do some sort of communion connects each of us there during that time making the experiencing of the story a one on one happening. I have come into their learning environment bringing each of them the special gift of wisdom for that day. Story telling is an existential I-Thou relationship. Each child there takes the bread of the story I am telling into their own lives, and their eyes tell me they know I am there as one who is serving them each food for their own heart/mind/soul – that I have come again to give each of them life – more life. I cannot help but feel a humble reverence for the very real and wondrous children each and every one of them sitting there on the circle eating up the wisdom I am feeding them.


    Our work as parentcators and educators has as a priority this simple yet profound obligation to recognize each child as being precious, unique, and truly a wonderful person who shares with us a personal capacity for caring about things, for significant intelligence and creativity, for adding to the glory of our universe. This is why Maria Montessori insisted in her reform of education that the most important part of a learning environment is not found on the shelves full of didactic materials – not within the pages of text books or workbooks – but within the hearts of each of us their elders who are called to understand and respond to each child given us with the daily proof of our nurturing love.
 

October 13, 2010 · Paul Czaja