As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day today, I am moved to write a bit about him as a teacher. Preachers (along with coaches and others who interact with us in various capacities in our lives) are teachers, of course. They struggle, as educators, with similar challenges in their teaching to those that we face in curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular teaching in law schools.
So many parallels are obvious. But I want to focus on one small (and perhaps less obvious) thread in this post: love. The choice of this focus derives from a David Brooks op-ed that I read a few days ago in The New York Times. The column included a number of helpful facts and ideas relating to the connection between emotions and intelligence. Perhaps one of the most poignant messages it conveyed was this one: “children learn from people they love, and . . . love in this context means willing the good of another, and offering active care for the whole person.” That rang true to me. How, then, might love unite Dr. King with teaching and learning?
Of course, as many may recall, Dr. King (like other Christian clerics) preached about loving one’s enemies. But I somehow sensed there was a more palpable, direct, individual connection among Dr. King, love, teaching, and learning. As I searched the web for specific references to substantiate and illustrate my hunch, I found online drafts of Dr. King’s papers, including “Draft of Chapter IV, ‘Love in Action.'” In this draft, Dr. King focuses in on the simple words of Jesus spoken from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) As I read Dr. King’s text, I understood that part of his message was that Jesus’s words expressed love, and through that love, Jesus taught his followers. By repeating and parsing Jesus’s words and linking Jesus’s love-through-forgiveness with the ignorance (or intellectual blindness) of those who did not love Jesus, Dr. King can be seen as more subtly making the same point that George Will made in his column: love and learning are intertwined. Specifically, Dr. King wrote:
One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong. This is not to say that the head can be right if the heart is wrong. Only through the bringing together of head and heart—intelligence and goodness—can man rise to a filfillment [sp] of his true essence.
(emphasis in the original)
I am not in the classroom this semester. Nevertheless, I will have some student interaction, including most prominently with my research assistants. I intend to carry the messages from the op-ed and Dr. King’s writings in my heart and work to push them into practice. George Will noted in his op-ed that “students have got to have a good relationship with teachers. . . . In good times and bad, good teachers and good students co-regulate each other.” I have always endeavored to relate to my students as best as possible despite age and other differences. But I know that is hard to do in a large-class setting. I also know there always are students who resist the entreaty to engage. “The call for intelligence,” Dr. King observed, “is a call for open-mindness, sound judgment, and love for truth.” Both instructor and student must share these values and observe them in the teacher-student relationship for the learning proposition to optimally succeed.
My sense is (and my anecdotal experience bears this out) that the results are worth the effort if instructors and students collaboratively invest in the teaching and learning process in this way. Do you agree? I am interested in your thoughts, consistent or inconsistent with the observations made here.