I have finished a book, and granted it wasn’t the book I planned on finishing next, but I finished a book no less. This one I had the pleasure to read for class, but that doesn’t mean reading Greta Nagel’s The Tao of Teaching was boorish work. The fact that I read it in two days–two busy days–is endorsement enough.
Part of my enjoyment came from the fact that I have had a long standing interest in Taoism. I had the pleasure of having the Tao Te Ching introduced to me by a very proficient scholar while in high school. I recall being 16 and reading aloud with gusto in my dormitory’s lobby. It was total revelation.
In an adaptation of her thesis, Nagel relates the 81 “main” ideas of Taoism to their application in the classroom and attitudes of teachers. It is interesting as my wise scholar mentioned earlier often espoused that Taoism was knowledge without knowledge, knowing without knowing. To transpose it to the structure that by definition deals with knowledge is such a wonderful idea, and also intrinsically Taoist.
Of course, one does not have to be a scholar of Tao to appreciate Nagel’s writing. Admittedly, my own studies have been lacking in the past year or so. She makes everything accessible, which is one of her strengths. She encourages the very intuition that bureaucrats have fought hard to kill in teachers of late. That intuition is the very thing that makes good teachers excellent.
I love alternative views of the traditional classroom, likely because my experiences as a public school student were often full of woe. A major premise of anthropology is that diversity is far more advantageous than homogeny. The standardization of the contemporary classroom is the downfall of education. We should embrace the examples Nagel uses, even the ones that have been legislated out of existence.
