Back to School: Teaching as Revelation

Teaching as an act of revelation. 

Alongside  leading students to discover the key elements of a given discipline, you also are leading them to discover what they can do and think or imagine that they didn’t yet know they could. Each activity is a stepping stone to who they are and who they might yet be. And both have everything to do with Soul, with the inner genius that accompanied them at birth given an invitation to emerge. 

 

To unlock the hidden facets of Soul, both art and artful teaching can be guides. Art is the key to unlocking the soul’s closed doors, inviting us to see deeper into things, to listen to the unheard music of the spheres,  to move like a dance in the world. As Coleridge (or Emerson— the source is not clear) once said: 

 

“Each object rightly seen unlocks another faculty of soul.”

 

That means that the wider the exposure to our multiple intelligences, the more opportunities we have to discover the hidden key. Likewise, within each field—the arts, for example—a wide exposure to all kinds of literature, art, poetry, music, dance, etc. is a path to growing larger souls. No one composer, artist, musical style can speak all of the multitude of selves within us— we need  Debussy to reach the places Bach can’t, jazz to touch the parts of ourselves that European classical music can’t reach, Indian music or gamelan or Ghanaian drum choirs to sing selves we didn’t even know we had. Amidst the social reasons to enlarge our repertoire beyond the Western canon are the deeper reasons to awaken large selves lying dormant within us.

 

Amidst the thousand problems of our notion of education since schools began, the narrowing down of our vision, our experience, our ways of learning, is near the top of the fix-it list. As you turn into the new school year, consider how you will widen the view, both for yourself as teacher and your students. You’ll both be happy you did.