60

Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity

Teaching today must include dedication to building character, community, humanitarianism, and democracy in young people; to help them think and act above and beyond the seductions and demands of the knowledge economy. Tom Sergiovanni talks about the importance of developing not just school effectiveness and high performance but also what he calls school character. Schools with character, he says, have unique cultures.
They know who they are, have developed a common understanding of their purposes, and have faith in their ability to celebrate their uniqueness as a powerful way to achieve their goal. A school displays character when the purposes, hopes and needs of its individual members are taken seriously by its culture at the same time that these members are committed to the common good.101

Schools with character recognize that teaching is not only a cognitive and intellectual practice but also a social and emotional one. Good teachers fully understand that successful teaching and learning occur when teachers have caring relationships with their students and when their students are emotionally engaged with their learning. Policymakers, administrators, educational researchers, and others who shape the nature of teaching, however, tend to neglect the emotions, play down their importance, leave them to take care of themselves. Performance standards, targets, checklists of competenciesthese are their priorities. By putting exclusive or excessive emphasis on them, those who shape teaching often not only neglect but also actively undermine the emotional dimension of educating. They turn learning into a clinical and disengaging race toward targets or ll teachers time with technical tasks so no time is left for creativity, imagination, and relationshipsfor all those things that fuel the passion to teach. Teaching and learning, however, are always social and emotional practices, by design or neglect. Students are excited or bored, involved or excluded. Charles Darwin showed that even the most seemingly singular cognitive activity of reflection is itself an emotion because it relies on an affective state of quiet concentration.102 Emotions are therefore not only important as a context for learning (as in setting an effective classroom climate, or establishing safe schools); they are integral to learning and teaching themselvesas part of the learning process and as social and moral goals and consequences of it. Sympathy is the emotional foundation of democracy. Efforts to teach beyond the knowledge society must recognize, incorporate, and attend to this social and emotional dimension of teachers work. One of the first implications of reintroducing a more overt emotional emphasis into teaching is the importance of teachers establishing emo-