I don’t know if anyone else experiences serendipity when they read, but I find it all the time. I’ll find the same content in two completely disconnected books! Sometimes the happy chances of serendipity occur when I am escaping into a celebrity game show. I have stumbled across three words this calendar year that I’ll be taking with me into the new school year.
The first two words are contrasting German words for human. I first ran across them last spring in Timothy Snyder’s book On Freedom, and again, serendipitously, in Iaian McGilchrists’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Snyder introduces the two words early in his book, and they are lynchpin ideas to his arguments about freedom. He says, “The German language has two words for ‘body,’ Körper and Leib. The word Körper can denote a person’s body but also a “foreign body”… a “heavenly body”… the “racial body” and other objects thought to be subject to physical laws. A Körper might be a alive, but it need not be (compare corpse)…” He goes on to add that “The word Leib designates a living human body, or an animal body, or the body of an imaginary creature in a story.” A Leib “can move, a Leib and feel, and a Leib has its own center…”
He then compares the two words. “When we understand another person as a Leib rather than a Körper, we see the whole world differently… A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of the knowledge we need for freedom.
A few weeks after reading Syder’s exploration of the two words, I ran across them again in The Master and His Emissary, where Iaian McGilchrist again describes Körper as person viewed as an object and Leib a person viewed as a whole person – body, mind, soul, and the mystery of consciousness all rolled into one.
I had been pondering this concept, and the fact that McGilchrist describes a left-hemisphere dominated world as one where “Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, TEACHERS (emphasis mine) and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend upon a degree of altruism, as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its (the left-hemisphere’s) power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthuring fear and mistrust.” In other words, we are treating teachers, and others who care about other people as Körper, not Leib.
And then I was watching Celebrity Who Wants To Be a Millionaire with Ken Jennings and Matt Damon as the contestents. One of the wrong answers on a question was the the word Eudaimonia. Curious about it, I looked it up. Eudaimonia is a word that has been translated a variety of ways: as good spirit, as happiness, as virtue, as flourishing. What occurred to me is that when we treat students – and teachers – as Leib, we are helping them achieve Eudaimonia – what Maslow might have deemed similar to self-actualization. But when we treat the people in schools as Körper, we are shooting for a very different result.
McGilchrist ends his book with visions of a right-brain dominated world and a left-brain dominated world. In that spirit, I’d like to contrast a Körper driven school with a Leib driven school.
A Körper driven school treats all the people in the school as objects, usually as data points. How did you do on the last test? How did your students do on the last test? Are you making learning gains? Students become numbers: “She’s a 2.” “He’s a 5.” “She’s a 4.” Teachers become what I have called Quantitative Learning Gains Facilitators instead of, you know, teachers.
People are forced to play standardized roles – they are, essentially, turned into algorithms. Teachers must dole out standardized lessons on a pacing guide that keeps everyone at about the same place. Students must sit through the standardized lessons. The human interests, enthusiasms, talents, and curiousities of teachers or students are not allowed a place in classrooms. Everyone must teach and learn the same things at the same pace. “Personalized Learning” in this system becomes a joke. It doesn’t mean learning designed to engage students as the real, living, breathing people they are. It means that an algorithm is checking to see how well they are meeting prescribed demands and then adjusting the questions they are being forced to answer to their current “level.” That’s not personalized. That’s standardization with slightly different pathways to uniformity.
Reading and writing as human activities are not valued in a Körper focused school. Reading as a human is too messy, too personal. A Körper focused school would limit students’ reading materials to texts that purport to raise test scores. Writing will not be personal – in fact the pronoun “I” will not be allowed. Writing will be strictly confined to prompts that will measure competency on a standardized rubric.
A Körper focused school views students not as whole people, as Leib, but as future employees. Not as future citizens, future spouses, friends, parents, or advocates.
The tech-bro CEO of Duo-Lingo said that once A.I.s have taken over all instruction in schools, teachers will still be need as baby-sitters. Viewing students as having computer-like minds that need data downloaded into them is treating them as Körper. Viewing teachers as nothing more than data-transfer experts – or, once the A.I.s take over – as babysitters, is to view them as Körper.
In a Körper focused school, autonomy is taken away. Leib need autonomy. Körper need to fit in to the system and all be as identical as possible. In a Körper focused school, students are treated in B.F. Skinner behaviorist ways: rewards and punishments and a survailance state. B.F. Skinner’s last book was called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. That is indeed the goal of a Körper focused school.
On the other hand, in a Leib focused school, education would be treated as a human endeavor. The interests, talents, enthusiasms, and curiosities of teachers and students alike would be taken into account. We would strive to educate the whole person, not just the tiny sector of the brain that takes tests. Students would be encouraged to read widely and read people with differing perspectives to learn how to deal with ambiguity.
Writing would be valued in all its forms as a way to develop students’ interests, empathy, creativity, and thinking. Creativity would be a top priority in a Leib centered school. Students would put the things they have learned to use in creating things: plays, stories, projects, real-world inventions.
A Leib focused school would focus on human relationships, on citizenship, on the common good and the individual good. It would focus on problem identification and problem solving. It would focus on engagement and not undermine it by posting all the material you need to need to succeed in a class online so students don’t even need to come to school. Classes would be experiental, can’t-miss events. Teachers would be encouraged to be the inspiring mentors they are instead of mere curriculum dispensers.
Students would play the “whole game” of whatever they are learning at a junior level.*
We would try to help students achieve more than just future employment. We would try to encourage Eudaimonia – the happiness, good spirit, virtue, of the whole person.
Despite a system determined to turn us all into Körper, I will enter my 34th year of teachihng determined to focus on my students as Leib, and to attempt to model Eudaimonia every day. If enough of us did that, it might not just change the system. It might change the world.
*A concept I first encountered in the book In Search of Deeper Learning and am now reading about in Making Learning Whole.