I don't quite fancy the idea that a teacher should resemble the character aspects of a martyr, for the same reasons that doctors shouldn't be accountable as gods or scientists as flawless brainiacs. These mythological and fantastical labels that are often stick on some professionals bring more harm to the efficiency of the job than the belief that is part of praise and encouragement. It means that idealizing these professionals has close ties to dehumanizing them.
When a professional is dehumanized, society doesn't seem to take their responsibility seriously, a responsibility that the professionals warn us all the time. Meaning that a god-like doctor is one who cures all diseases, instead of a society that is more concerned with their personal health care. A know-it-all scientist is one who carries all the answers instead of a community more engaged to create, question and produce more knowledge. Such as a teacher that is seen as a martyr, hence, it is the person who makes sacrifices taking all the responsibility from the students’ learning (and parents’ monitoring) as if it’s theirs. That's not education, that's patronizing.
A patronized student hardly works for the challenge and doesn't expect to learn from mistakes. It becomes a person who always sees inaccuracies as failures and avoids creativity. Of course this is more a hypothesis than a fact.
What would it be of the personal experience that everyone should go through to understand how to handle and overcome the limits? Learning is all about forcing out the comfort zone, embracing the fearless world of attempts and failures, rights and wrongs, correctness and mistakes. Being right is nothing but a point of view when it comes to most still in development knowledge out there. However, such an idea is so underrated that feeds the hesitation of those that consider learning a game of yes or no. It goes way beyond than that.
A teacher inspires and opens paths to foster more knowledge, sparking the mind into the path of curiosity, which leads to the discovery of a variety of subjects. Also it's a person who encourages despite the obstacles, working otherwise, to use them as a bridge to connect to new insights of information and ideas. A teacher is a master of mistakes, and instead of casting them out, use them as evidence to understand the students' thinking processes.
Being a master of mistakes means that every inaccurate evidence shouldn't be a discouragement, neither for the student nor the teacher. Instead, mistakes can be seen as an opportunity to explore creative thinking and offer different perspectives. As a master of mistakes, the teacher guides the students' perception into a new form of learning, and teaching how to learn, or as some say, learning to learn.
As a specialist in analyzing problems, and also solving them, a critical learner is not only a person who's always aware of what's in disagreement with the views of the world or personal beliefs. A critical learner is someone who's also open to review any process that becomes automatized and obsolete, reducing strategies to scrap and rebuilding them to lead knowledge forward.
A teacher who's capable of challenging the student for one's best is what makes a special teacher. But it's also a dangerous expectation since teaching is a very responsible role that should happen regardless of what our egos demand.
For that reason, it's hard to believe in education as a mandatory and universal ideia. People should pursue it on the fact that they really want it. The public education being mandatory was an attempt that has showed to be innefficient and unable to address the importance of why everyone should educate itself. It is a tool of power and control for the most than obvious reason of serving a demand of the Labour Market and the productivity for a Neo Liberal socieity, and nothing more.
This perspective shines a light on the fact that people constantly feel undermined, useless and struggle emotionally to find a place in this society where productiviy dictates what is important and what's not, casting out an immense group of people that, suddenly, weren't prepared for a new technology that makes their human jobs pointless, due to the ambitious of greed selfish men self proclaimed as the Elite of our human community.
It's a dangerous thought, because it grows within a feeling and desire for an alternative way of life, one that is hard to convince people to chase. We're daily being designed for accepting our reality for what it is. For years people have been studying what is a reality, trying to find out what exactly reality could be. Do we make it? Does it make us? Do we accept it, mold it on our own way, or is it both? Do we control it or does it control us? Could it be tangible? Does it happen in our sensority capabilities or is it something else?
And this philosofical idea, reality, boils over the responsibilities of being a teacher. We are demanded for a colossal task: shaping the minds and the reality of the newcomers, and as so, it is in our accountability what happens next. What a mind job, and unfair, to be honest.
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