Many educators feel powerless to do much about the complex and fast-moving crisis the United States is in. Many feel that the very foundation of our educational system is at stake, and a palpable sense of fear, anxiety, and anger has taken root in those serving in schools, colleges, and universities across the country.
How can educators navigate this crisis? That’s the topic I explored in February of this year with beloved teacher, writer, and activist Parker J. Palmer. Drawing on decades of experience as a teacher and organizer, Palmer has published 10 books and over a hundred essays pondering the intersections of education, community, spirituality, and democracy.
As Palmer noted in our conversation, “A liberal education was meant to illuminate the dynamics of our inner lives, to liberate us from oppression, to prepare us to participate in the civic life of a democratic society, and to learn about social responsibility and social change. So the fight to preserve education in the arts and letters and sciences is a critical part of the fight to preserve democracy.”
What follows is an edited version of my conversation with Palmer.
Margarent Golden: You’ve written a lot about how we can hold our heartbreak in life-giving ways. Can you help us understand as educators how we might better navigate these heartbreaking times so we can continue to serve our students, staff, and communities?
Parker J. Palmer: The good news is that the world you just described—the shattered and violent world “out there”—is not the only world in which we live. We also live “in here,” in the heart, in a world of inwardness, of human identity and integrity, of self-exploration around questions of meaning and purpose.
So when the external world breaks both our hearts and our will to act, we can turn to the world “in here”—not as a place to escape, but as solid ground on which to stand in the middle of shifting sands. In solitude and in community, we can do inner work aimed at holding hard experiences in ways that yield life, not death—ways that allow us to get leverage on the external world.
What I’m saying about the interplay of our inner and outer worlds doesn’t come from studying the world’s great wisdom traditions. It comes from studying the great liberation movements of the past few centuries. Every democratic movement I’ve studied began with oppressed people—people who’ve been robbed of every form of external power—going inward, getting re-grounded in their identity and integrity, and standing firm in the one source of power that no one can take away from them: the worthiness, the sacredness of their own selfhood. They make a transformative decision to live “divided no more,” to refuse to behave outwardly in ways that contradict the truths they hold inwardly.
And when people like that come together in organized communities of support—multiplying the power of identity and integrity many times over and insisting that the world honor it—we tap into a wellspring of resistance and transformation, a countervailing power that comes from what’s within us and what’s between us.
MG: Many of us today, including myself, have been trying for a very long time to change public educational systems to become more inclusive spaces, and yet we seem as a culture to be heading backward in many respects. I’m wondering if you have any wisdom to share that might help us keep our hearts open in the face of what has become such a long and difficult struggle?
PJP: Well, put me on the list of people who struggle with all of this. Today, at age 86, looking back on a life of commitment to education and democracy, it’s tempting to get cynical about all of the backsliding these days and throw in the towel. But I learned something back in the day that’s helped keep me in the struggle. During the 1960s in Berkeley—where I got my first lessons in social change—a lot of us felt certain that this was the generation and this was the decade that would set America on a new course.
I left Berkeley (and academic life) in 1969 to become a community organizer in Washington, D.C., focused on issues of racial justice. Five years into that work, it became very clear that the problems I was working on, like white supremacy, were perennial, not seasonal. It also became clear that if I wanted to maintain my commitment to social change, I needed a new frame in which to understand it, a frame with a lot less hubris and a lot more humility than the one that characterized the 1960s in Berkeley. I needed a frame rooted in an understanding that the pursuit of values like love, truth, and justice is endless work, intergenerational work.
That’s when I began to understand that human beings always find themselves standing and acting in the Tragic Gap, the gap between the harsh realities around us and what we know to be possible because we’ve seen it happen from time to time. It’s tragic not just because it’s sad, but because it is the result of our flawed nature, a flaw in reality itself. This gap is not a bug in the nature of things, it’s a feature that’s been known from the Greeks through the biblical era through Shakespeare.
Our job is to learn how to stand and act in the tragic gap, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that the gap will never close once and for all. We are asked to hold the tension of the gap, refusing to flip out into the cynicism that comes from giving in to life’s harsh realities—or into the ungrounded idealism that comes from floating above the fray in the world of possibilities. If I were to design a curriculum to prepare social activists, the Tragic Gap would be lesson #1, and the punch line would be, “If you’re not willing to spend a lifetime in that gap, and keep going despite all the ways you will fall short, you should find a different line of work.”
It helps to understand that short-term “effectiveness” cannot be the primary standard by which you live if you want to work for love, truth, and justice. If you insist on being effective, you’ll take on smaller and smaller tasks, because they are the only ones with which you can get quick results.
If you want to do deep work for social change, “faithfulness” is the only standard that will help you hold the course day after day. I mean faithfulness to your own gifts, faithfulness to opportunities where your gifts might help, and faithfulness to investing yourself where those two converge. That’s the only way you can live into the old rabbinical saying, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
MG: In your now-classic book, The Courage to Teach, you explored the question, “Who is the self that teaches?” In my role as a teacher educator, I’ve introduced countless students to that text, with many being completely blown away by your words. What about that book, do you think, really resonated with these teachers? And why did you give it that title?
PJP: I’m sure readers could answer that question better than I can! But I can say that when I wrote the book, I was not thinking about how to reach teachers. I simply wanted to write something that was faithful to my own experience as a teacher. When the publisher’s marketing people ask me, “Who are you writing to?,” I’ve always said, “I can’t answer that. All I can tell you is where I’m writing from, and that’s from a place of authenticity.” So I wrote about teaching as I experienced it within myself, an experience that has always been laced with a strong sense of calling, and a big dose of fear! When you write from your own depths, you have a chance to connect with the same depths in your readers.
I think the title resonated almost immediately with teachers. Unless you are phoning it in, you teach from a place of caring about your students, caring about your subject, caring about how to bring all of this into creative interaction. So good teaching makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability takes courage, especially in a culture of fear such as the one that permeates education.
So, I think good teachers felt recognized by the title, and by opening words like these: “Good teaching can never be reduced to technique—good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher, and from [their] capacity for connectedness.” I think the subtitle resonated as well: “Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life.”
“The pursuit of values like love, truth, and justice is endless work, intergenerational work”
The book is a humanistic approach to teaching, in contrast to the mechanistic approach so often taken by the focus on “tips, tricks, and techniques.” The good teacher is an organic node that holds together a complex weave of teacher, students, and subject. The finest compliment I ever got about the book came when I started doing retreats based on the book for K–12 teachers, retreats that grew into the Center for Courage and Renewal. At the end, one teacher said, “This is the first time in 20 years of teaching that I’ve been regarded organically, as a plant to be nurtured and grown, rather than as a broken machine to be fixed.”
One thing is clear to me: At the heart of education reform, we must have proper regard—respect, really—for teachers, and we must find ways to support their inner development as it impacts the practice of teaching. If we can’t do that, we will never have a system in which both teachers and students can thrive. And if the system refuses to provide us with that support, we must find ways outside of the system to support each other.
MG: I think it’s so important what you’re saying about vulnerability being at the heart of authenticity because that requires us to understand our gifts and our limitations. You’ve written a lot about the importance of embracing this wholeness. Can you talk a bit about what that means for educators?
PJP: For me, wholeness has nothing to do with perfection. Instead, it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. We live in broken times, and that leaves us feeling broken, as well.
In my work with teachers over the years, I’ve found that many of us are plagued by a sense of “not being enough.” The demands of teaching are endless and bottomless, more so today than ever before. I could spend my life beating myself up about the students I failed to reach, or the systems I failed to reform. But if I refuse to do the inner work required to integrate all of that shadow-side stuff into my sense of self, I disempower myself—and sooner or later it will take me down.
For me, this has been an existential issue related to my three deep dives into clinical depression. For me, liberation from all that darkness came when I was able to say, “I am ALL of the above—my gifts and my achievements AND the part of me that sometimes stands on the edge of a precipice and starts slipping into it.” Showing up in the world as we truly are is a source of strength and courage, since we are no longer spending energy trying to hide out. And it turns out that when we are willing to be vulnerable with more of our truth, we connect more deeply with others in the community that we all need to sustain us.
What keeps us from showing up with our whole truth—from speaking truth to power—is the knowledge that we are likely to be punished in some way if we do. In the social movements I’ve studied, I’ve found that the courage to live “divided no more” comes from people who have transformed their own understanding of the logic of punishment. They understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment—by living a divided life, by acting and speaking on the outside in ways that are not congruent with what we know to be true on the inside.
These days, at age 86, there’s one more motivator to live “divided no more”: I feel quite certain that there can be no sadder way to die than knowing that you never showed up in the world as your whole self, standing for all that you valued and loved, and against all that threatens it.
MG: I’d like to shift the conversation a bit and get your perspective on how educators can support our immigrant and LGBTQ students, that for many showing up “whole” is literally life-threatening.
PJP: I appreciate you naming that fact because my thoughts about the current administration hinge very directly on people being damaged, sometimes mortally damaged, by their actions. And, of course, there are forms of courage that very few young people are able to adopt or embody at this tender developmental stage of their lives. So I think it’s a lot about companioning those young people, advocating for those young people, accompanying and befriending them on what has to be an enormously crushing journey that so many folks are taking right now.
“At the heart of education reform, we must have proper regard—respect, really—for teachers”
As adults who understand that no punishment anybody might lay on us could possibly be greater than the punishment that comes from conspiring in our own diminishment, we must tell the truth about the injuries being done to trans kids, to other members of the LGBTQ+ community, to immigrants who are seeking a better life, and to asylum seekers, to any and all who will listen.
MG: A few years back, you gave the keynote address for a conference on spirituality in education at Naropa University. It was subsequently published as an essay entitled “The Grace of Great Things: Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning.” To this day, it is one of my favorites and such an important teaching for us now. Toward the end, you wrote, “The sacred is something we carry in our hearts into the world, in solitude and in community.” Can you explain what you mean by “the sacred” and how educators can carry it into their schools, classrooms, and communities?
PJP: Let me give this a little context. In the book, I define the inner life as having three dimensions: intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. And I define “spirituality” as ANY way a person answers the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than one’s own ego—something that can save us from the loneliness of self-absorption, something that can give us a sense of meaning and purpose.
I like this definition of “the spiritual” because it is value-neutral: It embraces all of the world’s wisdom traditions (including secular humanism) at their best as well as collective movements like the Third Reich that cause people to lose their identity and integrity and commit egregious evil. All of this falls under the heading of “spirituality.” As one of my teachers used to say, “When the Nazis talked about blood, soil, and race, they did not mean hemoglobin, dirt, and genes. They meant some sort of transcendent blessing on the superiority of the so-called Aryan race, a superiority that gave believers license to do anything they could get away with to advance their murderous cause.”
In that context, sacred means that which we find worthy of respect, which leads directly to the question, “What are we teaching our students about what’s worthy of their respect? Or about what will answer their yearning to be connected with something that will give them a sense of meaning and purpose?” As I look around the U.S. today and see what is pretty clearly the continuing decline of our democracy and the rise of something that looks a lot like early-stage fascism, I have a lot of questions.
What we owe our students are some basic tools of discernment to come up with life-giving answers to their spiritual yearnings. I’m irrevocably opposed to any form of indoctrination in the classroom. But I’m also opposed to any form of education that ignores the quest for meaning and purpose, and the tools of discernment that can help people make considered choices.
In education, that translates into deep respect for the students in front of me, seeing through the false fronts they often hide behind into the struggles of heart, soul, and mind that so many bring to the classroom. It also means deep respect for the discipline that I’m trying to bring my students into, a discipline that has developed over long years, sometimes centuries, of hard work by a lot of dedicated people, a discipline that should be the plumb line of everything we do.
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