Teaching Human Beings: The Role of Language in Education
Recently I took Clark McKowen's Teaching Human Beings with me on vacation.  I was not long into the book before my wife became startled by my frequent exclamations, such: "My God!" . . . "This is incredible!" . . .  From time to time I'd nudge her and say, "You've got to hear this."To be sure she really understood how taken I was with the book, I conferred my high regard by proclaiming: "This is not just a book. This is a great book!  Indeed, it ranks as one of the best books about teaching and learning I have read in the past thirty years.  No book in several decades has seized me so totallyor evoked more Aha!s, with the possible exception of Joseph Chilton Pearce's The Crack in the Cosmic Egg.As it was for me with Pearce's book, McKowen's proved to be a profoundly transforming book.  The essay "Teachers Should Be Unprepared," one of a number of provocative essays," provides a brilliant argument against structured lesson plans. "The well-regulated classroom," McKowen declares, "is anathema to thought," a thought that is likely to evoke resistance, even outrage, from some educators who think lesson planning must be done down to the last period. Nonetheless, he continues, "students are expected to go forth and think, never having witnessed the process. Ideation is cliff-hanging, but a lesson with a preconceived end is getting the equipment ready for mountain climbing and then taking the chairlift." "Life," McKowen reminds us, "is a mess; the mind is designed to straighten it out. Give students a pile of stuff. Let them make something of it, out of it and everything else. Let it be their achievement. The disarray is not some addled permissiveness or sloppy teaching.Let them make something of it."  Perhaps what is most astonishing about this book is that most of the extraordinary ideas and classroom practices the author has used seems to have principally come about through intuition. He is not content to tinker with conventional paradigms of learning and teaching, trying to improve upon them; he strives to take us into a profoundly different world of learning and thought.What he offers is only a peek at the "deep structure" of learning, a term favored by Gregory Bateson.  What he does do, with considerable finesse, is invite us to begin exploring what quantum physicist David Bolm calls the "implicate order" of education, that ineffable, invisible,non-material, spiritual universe of energy that underlies our common sense reality. McKowen asks only that, before undertaking the journey, we be willing to leave as much baggage behind as possible.  But in the end, if you happen to be one of those who doesn't want to read any book about education, then read this one for writing that will transport you, maybe even liberate you.  --Review by James E. Conner, Ph.D