Carl Rogers on education, part I

To me, the great majority of what Carl Rogers has to say seems highly relevant to education.  He also has a chapter in On Becoming a Person titled "Significant Learning in Therapy and Education," in which he lays out what he feels are the criteria for "learnings which are functional, which make a difference, which pervade the person and his actions."  I'll be quoting extensively... and I think it's too much for a single post, so, this is part I.

1. Contact With Problems

Significant learning occurs more readily in relation to situations perceived as problems.  ...The student in the regular university course, and particularly in the required course, is apt to view the course as an experience in which he expects to remain passive or resentful or both, an experience which he certainly does not often see as relevant to his own problems.  Yet it has also been my experience that when a regular university class does perceive the course as an experience they can use to resolve problems which are of concern to them, the sense of release, and the thrust of forward movement is astonishing.

When a whole nation perceives itself as being faced with an urgent problem of being behind - in agriculture, in industrial production, in scientific development, in weapons development - then an astonishing amount of significant learning takes place.

So the first implication for education might well be that we permit the student, at any level, to be in real contact with the relevant problems of his existence, so that he perceives problems and issues which he wishes to resolve. 

The Energy Project is in a good position to put students in contact with problems they care about and/or that are of national concern (e.g., sustainability), and in fact this was one of the motivations for forming the Energy Project in the first place.

2.  The Teacher's Real-ness

Learning will be facilitated, it would seem, if the teacher is congruent.  This involves the teacher's being the person that he is, and being openly aware of the attitudes that he holds.  It means that he feels acceptant towards his own real feelings.  Thus he becomes a real person in the relationship with his students.  He can be enthusiastic about subjects he likes, and bored by topics he does not like.  He can be angry, but he can also be sensitive or sympathetic.  Because he accepts his feelings as his feelings, he has no need to impose them on his students, or insist that they feel the same way.  He is a person, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement, or a sterile pipe through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.

The need for what Rogers calls "congruence" is based in his experience that human beings are keen perceivers of any kind of emotional falseness, remoteness, ambiguity, or mixed messages, and that when we perceive them, we tend to be confused and distrustful.  Then we don't show ourselves, and we avoid exploring risky territory because we don't feel safe, and "significant learning" is unlikely.  The effort toward "congruence" is most of what Rogers tries to do himself as a therapist:  If he can accept his own feelings and be completely transparent with his client, then he can be "almost sure the relationship will be a helpful one."

My experiences with the teachers in the Teaching Seminar (as we are now calling it) feel like an illustration of this to me.  Links to that sequence:  First session, second session, third session.

Continued in part II.