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Immanuel Kant has two ethical maxims that we have all heard: stated in simple terms, perhaps not entirely faithful to the original, they say the following: “Treat others as you want to be treated” and “Treat others as ends in themselves and not as means to achieve something.” I want to reflect briefly on how these maxims usually work in the classroom.
As with all ethical principles, it is common not only that they are not applied, but their opposite is applied. In the case of the first maxim, its opposite is not, as we would suppose, not to treat others as we want to be treated or to treat them as we do not wish to be treated. No, its true opposite, its most contrary opposite, is something worse, something much more twisted, something susceptible to passing before our eyes as good and ethical (“The corruption of the best is the worst,” said some wise man).
Let me explain. Since the Kantian principle plays with mirrors (“I treat you as I want you to treat me”), we leverage this for an interpretation in our favor. So, we stand in front of others as if we were their model, their example, and we expect them to copy us. In this new version, the maxim would say something like, “I teach you how I want you to treat me,” to which we could easily add, “and I force you to treat me like this.” Then it becomes “Learn from me how you should treat others,” and ends up becoming an ethical imperative: “Everyone must behave as I do!” A family friend said it better than anyone: “I’m very cool, so don’t contradict me.”
It is clearly the dictator’s maxim. In the teacher’s case, how he applies it to his students is easy to understand: “I am your example; you must follow me. If you don’t, it’s because something isn’t right with you, and you have to correct it.” From this, it is easy to leap to the following conclusion: “If you cannot correct it yourself, it will be necessary for an external force to intervene.”
This worsens when it operates subconsciously: the teacher feels exemplary without admitting it and expects students to agree. It is no longer a matter of imposing their values on the students as an example but of taking for granted that they raise them from the cradle. According to their way of thinking (subconsciously, I insist), there are “natural,” “universal,” and “human” values. (As absurd as it may seem, this type of superstitious belief occurs in some parents who expect their daughters and sons to behave differently from how they educated them: “How is it possible that he behaves like this?” they ask themselves, scandalized). Therefore, if students do not express the teacher’s values, the teacher assumes that they come from a dehumanized environment, and they must be alert because there probably is no longer a remedy. Importantly, these children must be stopped before their example spreads among others. They may end up being removed from the class, isolated, and even expelled, but before that (so as not to act inhumanely), the teacher will start by spotlighting, threatening, or humiliating them to counteract their negative influence. “You should feel ashamed of your parents and the education they give you at home,” said the school principal to elementary school children. (I heard this declaration decades ago, and it has resonated in my memory word by word.)
This dictatorial system is not exclusive to teachers; it also occurs with the same intensity among students. We can trace it to children at home who think their parents should behave as they want. They are little tyrants who have been pampered and raised at home according to those beliefs; they then come to the classroom expecting the same treatment: “The teacher must adapt to me,” they say to themselves. “If he does or surprises me with something better, I will consider him a good teacher.”
Note that we are not talking so much about the explicit content of values as we are about how they are transmitted. Principles can be sound and lauded by all. For example, a teacher or a student can proclaim that within the classroom, everyone must listen to each other, that there is mutual respect, and that everyone has equal opportunities. They can offer or request that the knowledge taught be current, democratic, and useful and promote inclusion. In short, they may believe they are positing values that the consensus considers positive. The problem, as I say, arises when that teacher or student believes that, since he is correct, it is natural for others to agree with him and unnatural for them not to do so. In this belief, in this faith (superstitious, as I have said, and conscious or subconscious), a dangerous frustration originates, which, combined with a certain degree of power, becomes tyranny and violence. That school principal who wanted students to be ashamed of their parents surely fantasized every night in the solitude of her bed about a world full of love.
How can this trend be dismantled?
If we want to review all we have said, let’s begin with the last word above (love, which I promise I didn’t introduce with this intention), and then let’s go back and see what happens. In my opinion, love has nothing to do with setting an example for another or agreeing with anyone’s way of being. I don’t love you so that you follow in my footsteps, or because you look like me, or because you imitate me, much less because you obey me and pay attention to what I say. I love you just because – period. The poet said, “If I didn’t love you, it is because I would love you for many reasons,” and it is clear that those reasons would have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with you looking like me or obeying me.
Nor do I love you because I admire you, or because I believe that by following you, I can arrive at a better place, or because I want to be like you, or I think I already am. I love you, period. As you love me. A world full of love has nothing to do with multitudes who share purposes or even with multitudes who share values and ethical principles. It is far from a world in which we all think the same, want the same, and agree, nor one in which we all follow the same loving leader. I believe that a world full of love is where we love each other, period. Our understandings and purposes may differ; our reasons for struggle may be contrary, but we love each other, and the same happens with our desires, preferences, forecasts, and ideals. They are different and even opposite, but they are not insurmountable obstacles between us. Love (as I like to define it) is no more than surrendering to the other before harming him, even before provoking fear in him. Our struggle or theirs does not matter: to love is to know that the other is worth more than any victory.
That is love. Does it seem unreal and unrealizable? Well, if it seems so to us, maybe it is. However, I cannot find another definition of “to love” that is more realistic and simultaneously gives meaning to the word.
Now, if that is what love is, and if we truly believe – along with Plato and Edgar Morin (to name two masters, one ancient and one contemporary) – that love is a condition for teaching and learning to flourish and for the classroom to be truly fertile ground, then all of us – teachers and students – must stop trying to beat others and let our values prevail. Of course, we could discuss at length what the word “beat” means and its value. Perhaps we could do like the wise Nagarjuna – one of the leading teachers and propagators of Buddhism – who taught his disciples to prepare themselves to win any argument about the highest truths of the universe and – nevertheless, immediately afterward – to be able to renounce these and admit the futility of all reason and all argument: thus, from that final emptiness of meaning, they could immerse themselves in the other side of this reality, that is, in that underside of the world called Nirvana.
Perhaps we could follow in the footsteps of Thomas Aquinas, who, after establishing the philosophical foundations of the religious culture of almost all the West, felt tired, renounced any reward that was not the love of God, contemplated a mystical reality in the face of which “everything he had said before was pure straw,” and stopped writing forever.
Or perhaps we can do like Chesterton, who assured us that he could convince any rival interlocutor if he were allowed to chat with him every night for forty years (of course, always accompanied by delicious dinners).
At this moment, I am satisfied with the statement of a more recent scholar, perhaps just as radical as those I mentioned but more aligned with the moderation and political correctness required in our time. I refer to a comment by Jorge Luis Borges, who, in one interview, said that “being right in an argument” seemed to him “a total lack of courtesy.” This statement, seemingly comical and exaggerated, was, in fact, expressed in all seriousness and reveals not only the importance of giving the other a higher place than any idea but also the total disagreement that it is more worthwhile to enthrone a truth than to prolong an encounter with another human being.
To conclude, I believe that this perspective gives the second Kantian maxim a new dimension. Without discarding the many cases in which we take others as means to our ends (or in which we consider that the ends of others are to use us as means), it is also common for us to violate this principle in another way, namely, believing that all people should pursue the same ends as ours and that we should all offer ourselves as means to achieve them as well as that whoever does not do so fails the good of the community and must be reprimanded. Alerted to this approach, we can consider the following principle: “Do not impose your ends on anyone, not even yourself, not to the extent that you conceive yourself as a means to achieve them.”
Finally, I summarize what I believe the most: that human beings are ends already achieved and that what remains while we are in this world is to educate one another lovingly to put aside the many things that prevent us from understanding this.
Translation by: Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
