Rita Pierson on the importance of relationships in education

 Editor's note: For decades I have noted the phenomenon that Rita Pierson talks about in this short video about the importance of relationship in education. As a Social worker and psychotherapist a major emphasis on the training of professional Social Workers and psychotherapists is how to develop and maintain "helping relationships" with clients. It has amazed me how little specific emphasis is placed on "helping relationships" in teacher training, especially training on how to develop and maintain relationships with "difficult" students.

In our contemporary society a great deal of emphasis is being placed on  evaluating teacher performance and too much of this emphasis is placed on the ability of students to pass standardized tests. Teaching has become an exercise in what James Paul Gee calls in his book "The Anti-Education Era"  "skill-and-drill"*.

What is forgotten is that we all are teaching all the time in the way we relate and treat people. If we see people as objects to be manipulated, coerced, persuaded, and brow beat we are teaching something that is unloving and antithetical to healthy human growth and development. If we relate and engage them in a respectful, empathic, and compassionate way we empower them to become their better selves.

In our efforts to raise academic standards and performance with governmental and bureaucratic "No Child Left Behind" kind of policies we have overlooked the pivotal role that positive "helping relationships" play in human learning. We don't want to learn from people we don't like and whom we think don't like us, understand us, and have our best interests at heart. Rita Pierson's talk is very important and enhances understanding of how education should and can work.

* "We live in an era of anti-education. We focus on skill-and-drill, tests and accountability, and higher education as a marker of status (elite colleges) or mere job training (lesser colleges). We have forgotten education as a force for equality in the sense of making everyone count and enabling everyone to fully participate in our society. We have forgotten education as a force for drawing out of each of us our best selves in the service of an intellectually and morally good life and good society." p. xiv, James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013