Calculus is great, but true 'educational excellence' is about developing good people.

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There are times as we are attempting to motivate our students that we over-emphasize the instrumental value of education. "Be good at school" we say, "and you will get a good job". By "good job" we imply the trappings of a "good life" - house, car, and happy family, and such like. There are many flawed assumptions in all of that, but most importantly, the "capitalist dream" model that we use (explicitly or implicitly) relegates much more important educational outcomes - emotional intelligence, gratitude, self-control, creativity, flow, and decision making (among a host of other key, life-determining elements) -  to a lesser position in the thinking hierarchy.

 

Good manners are regarded as quaint, kindness as soft, and selflessness is kept a record of to tick the 'service' box on a CV. 

 

There is something much deeper in each of these things that goes way beyond social constructs. 

 

Good manners are carefully constructed social codes for saying in an implicit way: "I see you - your humanity is unique and I notice that".  I am learning more and more about traditional Xhosa culture - one aspect that has particularly intrigued me is the lengthy process of greeting and the careful use of honorific. It sets a beautiful tone for what is to follow, be that a social conversation or a more formal meeting. Whatever the occasion, it starts with meaningful recognition of humanity. 

 

Kindness is a most underrated virtue, and we do our students a disservice by not explicitly teaching it, practicing it, and calling out its absence. Kindness is the opposite of 'softness' - it requires an inner strength and sense of self to recognise that each of us holds our own unique story as we journey through life, and that story is complex and non-linear. What we see in the face of our fellow humanity often hides a multitude of anxieties, pains, and emotional turmoil - kindness is the recognition that our own human frailty holds no higher hierarchical rank than any other. While we hope to raise children that are resilient and tenacious, this should never be at the cost of kindness.  It was one of my students that taught me "in a world where you can be anything, be kind".

 

We live in a deeply divided and unequal society. While politicians speak of equality, their deeds exacerbate an ever widening chasm between the wealthy and the "other" 65% of the population who own less than 10% of its wealth (World Inequality Report 2022, Chancel and Piketty (2021)). The recognition that we live in an unequal society is one of the greatest virtues that we can impart in our students, and encouraging them to offer support where they can for its own sake (un-noticed even) teaches them to value humanity for humanities sake as part of an inexorably linked community of souls living in this world at this time. But more than that, recognising that, although inequality is a fact, the absolute equality of human potential is a more powerful one. It spurs us on to acts of kindness. 

 

Interestingly, as I have been advocating for selflessness, kindness, and good manners as internal, intrinsically good aspects of a good education, it is a fact that acts of kindness contribute positively to the wellbeing of the giver, and so create a secondary "good". Similarly, good manners ease important social interactions and so themselves carry secondary instrumental value.  

 

A good education is about "educational excellence", of course -  books, assignments, numbers, and things- but to at least an equal extent it is about creating good people. In an unequal world where knowledge has been commodified and artificial intelligence takes on an exponentially growing role, re-discovering the elements of being good humans has never been more important.

 

 

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