For Love or Money

I know an excellent karate instructor who has developed a theory about the relation of money to karate. He has determined that he will never give any of what he knows for free, because the knowledge is a precious commodity for which he paid and trained over many years. He asserts that if someone else is unwilling to contribute money to learn it, they are saying that they do not value it properly, for money is so unequivocally the representation of value in our society.

In addition, he recalls frequently how we are endlessly obligated to the will of our teachers for what they have given us. I think that he makes legitimate points. They have merit. More important, they have caused me to think about why I am so desperately uncomfortable with them.

After due consideration, I believe my discomfort comes from the contradiction between the nature of teaching and the nature of money.

Money is, in its essence, a yang construct. Consider its origins, its uses, its effects, and you will be hard-pressed to come to any other conclusion. It replaced relatively cooperative, interactive, but inefficient economies with ones that allowed abstraction, competition, removal from the agents of production, and a huge leap in efficiency. These are all projecting, outward, forward aspects of action and idea.

A less direct means of understanding the yang-ness of money is to see how it is used for beneficent acts most effectively. Individual philanthropists wield money with targeted, but useful results. Money works to solve human-interest problems if it is directly controlled and aimed. Meanwhile, governments have been frustrated at the challenge of using money to systematize humane action. If money is employed in a more general attempt to cooperate and be good to each other, it often seems as though we might better have used it as toilet paper. So even in being kind to each other, direction, efficiency, and control are the hallmarks of money used well.

Money is simply not subject to a yin mindset. It turns all things around it into its domain of operation: yang. Money is not the only thing that is like this. Think of a spear. It is undeniably phallic in its design and employment. It is very useful to human beings as a means of killing for hunting, defense, orconquest. However, of what use is the spear to the process of helping each other? None whatsoever. It is a fine yang object for yang purposes. Like a spear, a money economy provides advantages. I would not want to be without many of the results. I like the modern medicine and indoor plumbing that would likely never have existed without money. I like being able to travel great distances at tremendous speeds rather than never being able to get more than thirty miles from my home. I love the benefits of trade so enhanced by money that we can experience things from all over the world right where we are. The advantages are so desirable and numerous that it is easy to dismiss the disadvantages of a money system. Since it is so purely yang, participation in the values it promotes, the life it gives, makes us unbalanced. We lose the yin that is half of life’s value.

Teaching can be seen to have yin and yang elements. There is some yang to it. Someone who is teaching is often putting forth, spilling out into the world a piece of him/her self. Overemphasis on these yang aspects of teaching has been perhaps the main cause of its having been pursued poorly in our systems of schooling. We used to metaphorize teaching as a pouring in. This metaphor is reminiscent of forced insemination. From the inception of public schooling until the last couple of decades, our patriarchal society has reaffirmed that this kind of mental desecration was what everyone needed to further the individual and sustain the community. The student’s job was to lie back and try not to scream while this ‘good’ was being done to them. After enough times of this, the victim would identify with the victimizers and their values, and we would get a successfully socialized adult.

It is merely a metaphor, and the violence to most students most times is certainly not comparable to the literal situation. Nonetheless, the mode of the activity fit the metaphor reasonably well. It is since the late 1960’s that we have begun to see the huge mistakes in this view of education. Education as an academic discipline and as a professional practice has started to understand that the appropriate yang of teaching is akin to the white dot within the black ‘fish’ of the yin-yang symbol symbol. Teaching is an essentially yin proposition. It is an offering of knowledge to others, a giving of what one has for the benefit of another. We teach prospective teachers today that effective learning is the project of the learner as helped by the teacher, not a project of the teacher working away upon figuratively supine students. Real teaching and learning are cooperative, interactive ventures including the teacher, the students, and the ideas all working together in equal measure for the growth of the student.

The final object is the increased human experience of the student. Education is that learning which humanizes. Teaching is the process of providing or facilitating that education for others. It is, in its essence, a yin activity. It is gentle, respectful, considerate, interactive, cooperative, and malleable to the student’s talents and needs. An artistic representation of its attributes would be mostly curved and softly colored, friendly to the eye, the ear, and/or the hand. Teaching is primarily inspirational, even if its form is often expositional. Even when it requires the pain of sustained work and effort from the students, it is theirs and the knowledge that belongs to them at the end is for them.

This is why teachers demanding more money, or teachers who hold what they have taught over the heads of their students (the “you owe me” mentality), seem pathetic, petty, and/or greedy. We have an intuitive and accurate sense that teaching is a giving process, not a getting process.

I am not arguing that money might not be offered by a student as part of what they sacrifice to the relationship. Nor would I ever be foolish enough to say that money is unnecessary for an educational system to operate. Institutions in our money-economy require money to support their infrastructure. Teachers need to eat and afford their family lives, rooms need to be built, owned, or rented, heating must be afforded. It is always reasonable that people demand to be able to be secure in their material affairs while they spend their professional time engaged in a humane, non-commercial project. Most teachers understand this, and they also know that no one ever got rich as a teacher, nor likely ever will.

Society’s responsibility, which the desire for money encourages us to neglect, is to make sure that the providers of our essential yin services (nursing, teaching, social work, etc.) are not cheated out of material security because they chose those functions rather than the yang functions more readily compatible with acquiring money.

I am a teacher, and to maintain my life, I recognize the need ofmoney. This does not subtract from the central idea to which I am building here: When we envision teaching as a direct transaction (“my knowledge for your money”), which a money-system encourages, we do damage to the essence of teaching. It might be said that, when you get to the bottom line (or other monetary metaphors), teaching is still a service for exchange, like any other. To this, I would argue that teaching came long before money, and will persist even if money disappears entirely. Teaching is only a commodity for exchange in a society that is limited in its vision of transactions; a money economy. Of itself, it is the converse of a commodity for exchange, it is a giving for the good the gift will do.

I cannot genuinely be a teacher and expend much focus on what I am owed from others. It is anathema to the project. Demanding money or any other payment as a necessary agent to teach, then, is oxymoronic. Teaching is a humane, yin process. If I am recalcitrant to offer what I have, that the student might benefit, until I see something in it for me, I am not really a teacher. I may be an instructor, but I am certainly not a teacher. I would be working for my own material benefit, not the students’ further humanization, and that is not teaching. I would be out for yang, not in for yin. If I am a teacher in what I consider the truest sense of the word, a person called to facilitate education, my ambition and my mind cannot be on material matters. To the extent that it is, I am less a teacher, and what I am offering is less educative.

If we must have exchange rather than gift terms, I can providethem: What I ask of my society is the means to prosper reasonably in life. In exchange, I will offer an essential service to the society through the education of individuals within it. What I ask of my students is sacrifice of time, effort, and commitment to gain knowledge. In exchange, I will openly give them all the knowledge that is mine to give, with all the skills I can muster to give it. Moreover, once it is theirs, it belongs to them, and I will never demand fealty or other form of payment for what was gained. That is what I believe it means to be a true teacher.