Teaching

               Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers,  older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity. (I Timothy 5:1-2)

                It’s been said that we live in a therapeutic world, but we also live in a culture that focuses greatly on education. Our goals are to make people healthy and intelligent, according to our definition of those terms. Generally, that means that they will think like we do (whoever “we” are). And lots of those who consider themselves elite enough to treat and educate others seem to have some particular ideas about what healing and teaching others is supposed to look like. Oddly, it’s not the way they would want to be treated by their therapist or taught by any parent or teacher out there, but they somehow think that bludgeoning and belittling, demeaning and demonizing, and rejecting and ridiculing is just what the doctor ordered.

                According to researchers, just as people love differently, so they also learn differently. A good teacher uses a variety of methods to teach a group of people, to reach all of them. Someone with only a few students can fine tune their methods: visual, auditory/aural, reading/writing/research, kinesthetic/tactile, logical/analytical, social (interpersonal), and solitary (intrapersonal). Students may use more than one. But here are some methods that aren’t included in Scripture or in the educational material about teaching: harassment, foul language, humiliation, deceit, ridicule, abuse, shaming, demeaning humor, rejection, manipulation, exploitation… The list undoubtedly goes on, but you get the idea.

                Unfortunately, more than a few people think that “schooling” someone is the way to get them to learn. It’s all about the “teacher” using power to force the lesser, incorrect person to bow to them. But that’s not how Scripture teaches us to teach. In each case, what we are to teach others is how to defeat their worst selves, and build their best selves. And we cannot do that while indulging our own worst selves or while bludgeoning them.