I wrote this quick note after listening to the philosopher Michel Foucault, philosopher.
What follows does not pretend to be an explanation of his thinking…Just the way his words resonated in me.
Foucault once claimed that he never came to teach,
He said he had never entered a classroom with the intention to teach anything.
His approach is to show students the content of his work.
This instantly neutralizes the image of the teacher teacher.
(And, at this point, somehow reminds me of Mile Davis once saying he had never liked the trumpet trumpet -… Repeating the same word to denounce the limited interpretation it may have)
Teachers’ jobs consist in being who they are : this is what they have come to offer to students.
When they leave the classroom, their work can resume – their true practice.
Rolling out a thousand-kilometer knowledge carpet to half-asleep students, too dumb to find to access it themselves is not a job. It is a total chore, the stark opposite of fulfillment.
If this is what we do while we think of ourselves as teachers, we might as well screw bottle caps on an assembly line all day long.
Franck Joseph
©FJ April 2021 – All Rights Reserved
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Notes & Silence 