The School Ritual | Education: Leisure and Business

In his book Lessons of the Masters, George Steiner speaks of the ancient Greek sophists, the first “philosophers” who charged for their teachings. With this pretext, the British thinker enters into a series of reflections on the legitimacy of receiving money for sharing wisdom with others. Steiner, a teacher for decades, confesses his own questioning and even regrets accepting pay for his teaching activity, declaring that, given what he has received for being an educator, “it might have been absolutely more appropriate for me to pay those who invited me to teach.” However, he also admits that “an angry, disdainful common sense exclaims teachers have to live; even the most elevated Masters have to eat!

The issue is not easy. Education is surrounded by an ancient aura that relates the teacher to the sage and the latter to the saint; thus, teaching continues to have one foot in the spiritual world and the other in the field of economic reward. Teachers are undoubtedly among the timidest professionals when negotiating fees.

The associations between school and material subsistence are also of other kinds. Even before mentioning the obvious relationship between receiving an academic education and earning a living, we can say that between school and business, there is a link that dates back to the very origin of those two words. I have already said elsewhere that in its etymology, school (scholé) means leisure, that is, the opposite of business. The former speaks of play and rest and is associated with knowledge worthy in itself; the latter refers to work and duty and is associated with an activity helpful in obtaining something. Despite this etymological opposition between school and business, it does not take great science to realize that the relationship between knowledge and material subsistence has existed in educational actions since its origins. These are part of a school ritual that combines the love of knowledge with a knowing that prepares the disciple to earn a living. Yet, this relationship never ceases to be tense. While the world of philosophy refuses to put a price on knowledge, the market takes revenge by underestimating the role of knowledge in economic transactions, where people charge for their time and effort or risk-taking, but not for what they know. Under this perspective, most of us still find abusive the technician who charges us a fortune for a job he did in just a few minutes, regardless of whether the result was excellent. Although plausible, it still sounds strange: “I charge for what I know how to do, not for the time it takes me to do it.”

Teachers are undoubtedly among the timidest professionals when negotiating fees.

Academia, then, is deeply intertwined with both business and the love of wisdom (or philosophy): Let us remember that the school of Plato was called Academia and not forget that although he did not charge anything to his students, he did receive patronages that allowed the school to be sustained. Socrates, his teacher, did not charge either, but he did not lack banquets and dining invitations that included his disciples. In the Christian world, many great teachers were and are ascetics. I think St. Francis commented, “I need little, and what I do need, I need little.” Christ himself, who exalted the poor and marginalized, was not very interested in projecting an image of himself as someone who enjoyed deprivation. Among his disciples, one served as treasurer; his first miracle was to provide wine to the guests at a party; he multiplied loaves and fishes so that his followers would eat until filled, and still, leftovers remained, among other examples.

One of the main concerns about teachers charging for their teachings is that they skew them to keep the payer happy. The risk of not pleasing the student is, obviously, losing the garden, but in some contexts, defrauding the disciple can have fatal consequences. (The tragic case of Giordano Bruno, who fell into the hands of the inquisition betrayed by a mediocre student dissatisfied with his teachings, comes to my mind). Other problems with pay are that the teacher is actually an imposter who charges for teaching false things or a great connoisseur who delays the student’s progress to continue charging (or flat out to keep out future competitors from the nourishing root; but that is another case).

Fortunately, humanity soon sought to protect itself from this type of risk and managed to develop an institutional educational model that gradually regulated the problematic relationship between students and teachers. This model is the origin of basic study programs, professional profiles, evaluation strategies, the regulation of tuition and salaries, and many other things. To implement these benefits, the institution also tied them to the charge for teaching, leaving behind the old artisanal teaching system. What matters to me now is that all these changes, with their outstanding advantages, also represent a risk. They are (like everything human) a two-edged sword, something difficult to handle. On the one hand, they guarantee a minimum level of quality in the classroom for both students and teachers, but on the other, they tend to create standardized quality systems and a type of teacher/student relationship that, in the long run, can end up homogenizing the exchange.

The image of a school that expects its teachers to teach, demand, and evaluate its students uniformly, with a more or less standard level of training, is emerging more and more clearly. Such school places less and less value on the originality of those who learn and teach, and what is taught. At its doors, society eagerly awaits the best or most qualified specialists to emerge, but a horde of standardized professionals graduate, large enough that there is never a lack of schooled resources to cover standardized social needs.

The schools, which previously formed a varied network of personalities, knowledge, desires, aspirations, achievements, and challenges, and which fostered competition and differences to deliver to the world a true mosaic of professionals finally – those same schools now tend to homologate and match students in a measured level of cost-benefit. The panorama is so disconcerting that some of us are already beginning to miss those schools that we previously criticized for encouraging competition among students. (We resemble those parents who, seeing their children isolate themselves before their screens, feel nostalgic for times when the family gathered to watch TV together.)

Schools, which used to form a varied network of personalities, knowledge, desires, aspirations, achievements and challenges, now tend to standardize and match students in a measured level of cost-benefit.

To the extent that the school standardizes its results and homogenizes its students, it seems that the task becomes simple: you can admit more students and teach more routine and less personally engaging classes; teachers’ performance can be standardized and made more easily transferrable and interchangeable (their salaries obviously also are tied to this dynamic). However, this is only in appearance because, paradoxically, when students or their parents notice that studies are more homogeneous and results are similar everywhere, they realize that schools are fundamentally interchangeable. With exceptions, very little distinguishes them from each other.

And now the worst news: a pandemic that evidences the virtues of online education and its first cousin, self-teaching, is enough for an exponential tendency to set aside the standardized curricular offering and turn to the self-managed, self-service education, with its great variety of training options. Reality is always more alive than programming and planning. Abruptly, the educational system is beginning to recognize the need to accommodate itself to this self-management model through various strategies. Now that the highest-level information is at the hand of any internet user, schools are struggling to remain essential. They must quickly mobilize to develop programs, models, systems, structures, and platforms and expand their offerings to those who self-manage their training and dispense with a curricular system dictated from outside. A global bloc of teachers and education entrepreneurs strive daily to close ranks and prevent self-management from overflowing and displacing academic systems; however, reality, replete with its spontaneous young people, suspicious parents, and employers simply on the hunt for the highest bidder, can suffer a fatal setback at any moment.

Some of us think that the solution is not to continue creating standards, now strangely packaged as “personalized,” because it is how schools only find themselves in worse predicaments to fashion something that makes them different. Instead, they may continue to be essential if, leveraging all the benefits of distance technology, they ardently adhere to the values of education where knowledge for its own sake dialogues with the knowledge made to earn a living and where the personal exchanges of students and teachers flourish in authentic and living relationships, and let this vitality be what tuition and salaries reward.

Educational institutions must transform themselves and take advantage of all the technologies and methodologies necessary to become schools of the future. Ultimately, however, they can only achieve this if, with each change, they cling to the explosive, expansive, close, and profound essence of a school ritual that we have been inheriting for millennia.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints, and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.