Is Love the Key to Learning?

Columnist David Brooks penned a commentary in which he argues that students’ emotional relationships with instructors are essential to their learning. Teachers who read his piece might have occasional moments of well-of-course-duh, but that shouldn’t overshadow the earnestness of Brooks’ epiphany and what it could mean for other readers who share his enlightenment.  Here’s how it starts:

A few years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, I made an announcement to my class. I said that I was going to have to cancel office hours that day because I was dealing with some personal issues and a friend was coming up to help me sort through them.

I was no more specific than that, but that evening 10 or 15 students emailed me to say they were thinking of me or praying for me. For the rest of the term the tenor of that seminar was different. We were closer. That one tiny whiff of vulnerability meant that I wasn’t aloof Professor Brooks, I was just another schmo trying to get through life.

That unplanned moment illustrated for me the connection between emotional relationships and learning. We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains.

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