Learning as Life-Giving

Spirituality and education are not often used in the same breath today, but perhaps they should be.  Parker Palmer wrote a beautiful treatise on the topic back in 1983.  Here’s an excerpt (curated by Maria Popover, who offers her own meditation on Palmer as well):

I call the pain that permeates education “the pain of disconnection.” … Most [educators] go into teaching not for fame or fortune but because of a passion to connect. We feel deep kinship with some subject; we want to bring students into that relationship, to link them with the knowledge that is so life-giving to us; we want to work in community with colleagues who share our values and our vocation. But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us.

Read the rest @ Brain Pickings

Photo by mikecogh