Teaching Human Beings: The Role of Language in Education

3 months, 16 chapters, 220 pages in, tons of little Post-It stickies...and I am still not done reading this book. It is really a gift from the author, a teacher who never gave up pushing his own understanding of what learning is. Clark has obviously poured his deeply felt convictions into this book and it shows: Packed with fascinating anecdotes, examples, and historical tidbits, Teaching Human Beings: The Role of Language in Education is a book every educator could learn from.Much more than just about language it is really about how we need to let learners get on with learning - to the natural and quite correct conclusion that teachers really should not teach. Rather, they should get out of the way of students learning and simply be there to support them in their own personal path.If you are a teacher who *really* wants to help students learn, and are willing to throw away every bit of your specialist knowledge pride you have enroute to that goal, this book would make a nice companion to your career.

Recently I took Clark McKowen's Teaching Human Beings with me on vacation. I was not long into the book before my wife became . . . "This is incredible!" . . . From time to time I'd nudge her and say, "You've got to hear this." To be sure she really understood how taken I was with the book, I conferred my high book! Indeed, it ranks as one of the best books about teaching and learning I have read in the past thirty years. No book in several decades has seized me so totally\226or evoked more Aha!s, with the possible exception of Joseph Chilton Pearce's The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. As it was for me with Pearce's book, McKowen's proved to be a profoundly transforming book. The essay "Teachers Should Be Unprepared," one of a number of provocative essays," provides a brilliant argument against structured lesson plans. "The well-regulated classroom," McKowen declares, "is anathema to thought," a thought that is likely to evoke resistance, even outrage, from some educators who think lesson planning must be done down to the last period. Nonetheless, he continues, "students are expected to go forth and think, never having witnessed the process. Ideation is cliff-hanging, but a lesson with a preconceived end is getting the equipment ready for mountain climbing and then taking the chairlift." "Life," McKowen reminds us, "is a mess; the mind is designed to straighten it out. Give students a pile of stuff. Let them make something of it, out of it and everything else. Let it be their achievement. The disarray is not some addled permissiveness or sloppy teaching. Let them make something of it." Perhaps what is most astonishing about this book is that most of the extraordinary ideas and classroom practices the author has used seems to have principally come about through intuition. He is not content to tinker with conventional paradigms of learning and teaching, trying to improve upon them; he strives to take us into a profoundly different world of learning and thought. What he offers is only a peek at the "deep structure" of learning, a term favored by Gregory Bateson. What he does do, with considerable finesse, is invite us to begin exploring what quantum physicist David Bolm calls the "implicate order" of education, that ineffable, invisible, non-material, spiritual universe of energy that underlies our common sense reality. McKowen asks only that, before undertaking the journey, we be willing to leave as much baggage behind as possible. But in the end, if you happen to be one of those who doesn't want to read any book about education, then read this one for writing that will transport you, maybe even liberate you.

A review by Dr. James E. Conner, Raleigh, North Carolina, printed with his permission: Recently I took Clark McKowen's Teaching Human Beings with me on vacation. I was not long into the book before my wife became startled by my frequent exclamations, such: "My God!" . . . "This is incredible!" . . . From time to time I'd nudge her and say, "You've got to hear this." To be sure she really understood how taken I was with the book, I conferred my high regard by proclaiming: "This is not just a book. This is a great book! Indeed, it ranks as one of the best books about teaching and learning I have read in the past thirty years. No book over several decades has seized me so totally--or evoked more Aha!s, with the possible exception of Joseph Chilton Pearce's The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. As it was for me with Pearce's book, McKowen's proved to be a profoundly transforming book. The essay "Teachers Should Be Unprepared," one of a number of provocative essays," provides a brilliant argument against structured lesson plans. "The well-regulated classroom," McKowen declares, "is anathema to thought," a thought that is likely to evoke resistance, even outrage, from some educators who think lesson planning must be done down to the last period. Nonetheless, he continues, "students are expected to go forth and think, never having witnessed the process. Ideation is cliff-hanging, but a lesson with a preconceived end is getting the equipment ready for mountain climbing and then taking the chairlift." "Life," McKowen reminds us, "is a mess; the mind is designed to straighten it out. Give students a pile of stuff. Let them make something of it, out of it and everything else. Let it be their achievement. The disarray is not some addled permissiveness or sloppy teaching. Let them make make something of it." Perhaps what is most astonishing about this book is that most of the extraordinary ideas and classroom practices the author has used seems to have principally come about through intuition. He is not content to tinker with conventional paradigms of learning and teaching, trying to improve upon them; he strives to take us into a profoundly different world of learning and thought. What he offers is only a peek at the "deep structure" of learning, a term favored by Gregory Bateson. What he does do, with considerable finesse, is invite us to begin exploring what quantum physicist David Bolm calls the "implicate order" of education, that ineffable, invisible, non-material, spiritual universe of energy that underlies our common sense reality. McKowen asks only that, before undertaking the journey, we be willing to leave as much baggage behind as possible. But in the end, if you happen to be of those doesn't want to read any book about education, then read this one for writing that will transport you, maybe even liberate you.

This book has life and profession-saving potential. It combines the author's keen insights, drawn from forty plus years of teaching, and practical tips, with a clarion call to the heart of the artist in each and every reader. It's a necessary antidote to most schooling. Few books manage to canvas such a broad terrain of topics so ably and artistically. Mr. McKowen's generous spirit infuses the prose throughout this work, providing in deed what most author-by-committee texts consistently fail to educational texts lurch awkwardly in stodgy prose through one theory after another, consistently managing to avoid any recognition of the larger philosophical implications of their work. A jumbled mess, these texts succeed most in their ability to bore the reader and, worst of all, to reinforce the impression that teaching is principally a technical enterprise (an argument which inevitably clears the way for the replacement of teachers by computers). From the first chapter, McKowen sets the reader is a sacred endeavor involving the commingling of spirits in and through matter (you'll have to let the author help you make sense of that).I have assigned the book in my graduate classes over the last two semesters. It never fails to provoke profound conversations and sincere introspection. In many cases, it has given students a vocabulary for a previously faint intuition of their real purpose for teaching. In other cases, it has provoked students to re-dedicate themselves to a profession that had begun to wear down their commitment. Further, Mr. McKowen's work has helped me greatly to re-assess many of my own teaching theories and practices. I am delighted to say that I have used many of his suggestions with very positive results (it is still very much in the experimentation stage).Teaching Human Beings is a rare and challenging book, which, as my students often argue, should be required reading in every academic venue. If one is sufficiently open-minded, she will find much to help re-create her personal and professional life.