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Total Obedience?
I want to start this article (this philosophical fantasy) by talking about the limits of our obedience. As we all know, human beings cannot be completely obedient. Even in the so-called totalitarian regimes (which are not only political), we succeeded. As we also know, people can never be something completely, not obedient, not orderly… nor good, nor bad, nor anything. Not everything or anything. We know it, we are sorry, and we have always heard it everywhere. The Spanish philosopher María Zambrano sums it up by describing us as “a totality that is missing something.” That is why we fluctuate —more or less sharply— between different versions of ourselves, trying to make the fluctuations bearable, manageable, even peaceful and happy once in a while.
It is possible that, in the hope of acquiring some stability, we human beings have created laws, invented penalties, and tried to forge discipline to comply with all versions. However, the rules and their regularity remain somewhat challenging to establish and follow. Although we make agreements with each other – putting into them a denoted effort– we often fall into the despair of not having a permanent refuge.
The Receptive and the Creative
In the classroom, children and young people also slip between extremes, such as being there and going out into the world. These two poles dialogue with each other so that the student learns to take care of himself. The school ultimately seeks to contain the students and at the same time boost their creativity so that they can inhabit the surrounding reality.
Ancient Eastern philosophers described this dialogue (that communication) as a movement and perpetual exchange between two forces, one receptive and the other creative, which governs individual behavior and is also the basis of everything that exists. These two forces were likened to the feminine and the masculine, the mother and father, the Earth and the Sun, the darkness protecting everything and the light that exposes all. Those philosophers drew analogies between the outside world and human nature for understanding and guiding both the individual and society.
In this context, we can compare ourselves with a river that rises inside a mountain. There, the water spends long seasons accumulating under the ground, building pressure, and, finally, sprouting to the surface in the form of a spring. The process that follows resembles childish and youthful stubbornness. The I Ching or Book of Changes (a sacred text of the ancient Taoist and Confucianist doctrines) explains this foolishness more or less as follows: “When emerging from the spring, at first the water does not know where to go, but its constant flowing circumvents all obstacles and fills every gap it finds on the way. So it ends up covering everything and advancing, achieving its success.”
Then, the water becomes a river, increases its strength, enters into calm, and sometimes overflows, fertilizing the ground and endangering the life that it helped to sustain. For those Chinese teachers, all of these infinite movements of the receptive and the creative intertwine to, as we have said, create laws, establish penalties, and forge a disciplinary model that helps the fulfillment of both. [i] According to this millennial knowledge, rarely is discipline a forced introjection of law or blind effort to obtain achievement. It is more like (and probably comes from) that little whip that, in centuries past in places like the school or the convent, was used to reprimand others or self-reprimand. This punishment was called “discipline,” and to receive disciplines was to receive whippings. It is better to understand the term as perseverance to harmonize the personal with the social, the natural and the transcendent, and govern our behavior accordingly. (For example, contain ourselves and others, correct the course, recover strength, risk only when necessary, know when to withdraw and fight, and prepare for a lengthy “etcetera” before achieving success). In short, contain and create our life flow, alone and in communication with others.
Mother and Father
The current era is characterized by a drawn-out confrontation between the feminine and masculine, a controversial dialogue to reconsider the attributes of both. I say this because talking about maternal and paternal functions starts to sound a little old-fashioned and confusing. This, although decisive today, is not unprecedented. Since time immemorial, it must be recognized that there has been in both women and men the ability to embody multiple shades of the female/male spectrum. Speaking specifically about child-rearing, mother and father can protect children and encourage them to face the world’s laws. Today we seek to strengthen that equity, but achievements are slower than we want, and there are still many things we cannot explain without the old mythology bequeathed in words.
Thus, when the river overflows, it is said that “it came out of the mother.” The phrase is suggestive: from the word, mother are derived wood and matter. The mother is wood, matter, support; the mother gives us a body, a handhold to the cosmos. Coming out carries the danger of overflowing without limits, getting lost outside of oneself, and being the river that spreads until lost in the world.
The mother embraces the son like the banks hug the river:
Mother, it is not that you protect us from the outside, rather, make the interior whole.
The children who come out of the mother risk danger if the father is not there to receive and direct them; similarly, they will not be safe if the mother is not present to welcome them back. From the word father comes patrimony, which evokes what someone gathers for himself when going out into the world. Also, the word homeland comes from the outside world that we are getting to know, and which we finally turn into an exterior/interior, calling it motherland.
In the school, the feminine and the masculine also converge, the maternal and the paternal. There the teachers drive the students to go out and explore the world; they await their return. School is the right place to play stray and recover. Suppose we add to the list of receptive and creative attributes the basic principles of communication (listening, being open-minded, and responding creatively). In that case, we understand why teachers view communication as the first and best tool to handle their students’ delicate comings and goings. Communication is understood as dialogue where receptivity and creativity unite to lead our walk and guide others.
Excess and Limits
The English writer G. K. Chesterton (whom some scholars came to consider one of the most intelligent people in history) was sure of his way of thinking. With his particular humor, he claimed that he could convince anyone of his ideas if he could have him or her at his table every night for forty years, dining and chatting.
Let us put ourselves in that place and imagine that we are wise and that reason assists us. In such a case, perhaps, yes, it would be enough for us to chat endlessly with someo
ne to get them to think like us; for example, to abide by a rule that we were sure was just. If such an impossible communication did occur, being wise, a person experiencing such excess would reach a point of putting a stop to it. Ideally, it would be a timely and appropriate limit for that person and the situation. However, the truth is that however wise we may be, we will never be able to maintain everyone on the perfect boundary they need and deserve. We are not God, and we cannot know anyone as if we had created him. We are human and, in reality, not so wise, so we usually rush to put a severe “enough is enough” (a severity that helps us hide our doubts). Alternatively, we soften and postpone the determination, feeling tempted to talk endlessly with the offender until convincing him. Finally, except in moments of genuine inspiration, the arbitrariness of the limits we set makes our “enough is enough” doubt ourselves.
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Sooner or later, every teacher turned into a magister must take the scales of justice into their hands, sharpening their ear to listen (being receptive) and having all their creativity ready to respond. Yes, even if someone breaks a rule, communication still takes place: The law is never the end of the road; it is always part of the delicate dynamic between the receptive and the creative, and it intends to correct the course. Thus, at least ideally (as the Chinese sages also desired), the site of the limit should be a point of passage; a space, albeit restricted, that is internally widened by the sensation of shelter, where one can truly reflect on their lack and from which the personality emerges not only whole but strengthened.
Nevertheless, teachers should not be ashamed if they rarely set the correct limit at the precisely right moment. We all know how difficult it is to arrive at equilibrium—examples of that difficulty we have all over the world. Perhaps we will say more if we mention a case to the contrary, one in which doing justice is easy. I know of only one example. It appears in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and contains teaching that we should always consider when judging. It is the riddle that some prankster subjects pose to Sancho Panza when he receives the position of governor of an imaginary island. In summary, the riddle is about a man who arrives at a bridge over which is the warning, “He who lies will be hanged.” Defying the reasons of justice, the man assures, “I come to be hanged.” (If they hang him, he will have told the truth, and if not, he will have lied, and they would have to hang him). Thus, to demonstrate his skills as a governor, Sancho had to solve this seemingly insoluble dilemma.
However, for the naïve labrador and squire, there is no difficulty. He even has the luxury of joking: “Let the part of the man that swore the truth pass, and the part that lied be hung.” Ultimately, he presumes that he will resolve the matter in two kicks (see please the note[ii] at the end of this article): “For there is no way to hang half a man, setting free the other half; if the balance is true, having the same reasons to condemn him as to forgive him, what is left over is the law. If he forgives that man, if he ever bends the rod of justice, it is better to bend it toward mercy rather than punishment.”
[i]Those movements involve both the individual and the community and the surrounding nature, and as I say, they are countless. The I Ching gathers 64 kinds of parables that try to decipher these movements. Each of these stories applies to six different situations and transforms or mutates into another of the 64 parables to add something.
[ii]The present version of the passage of Don Quixote is taken from the play Sancho Panza by the Spanish playwright Alejandro Casona, which recapitulates pages of Cervantes’ original.
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.
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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 
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