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When I ask people what positive things about their schooling stand out in memory, they often mention a particular teacher, even a particular moment with a particular teacher.

A lot of educators have written about the importance of care in schooling, and I'd like to underscore an aspect of care, of meaningful relationships with adults, that, I think, warrants attention:  The intimate relation between these relationships and learning, good ol' hard-nosed cognitive outcomes.

I have a personal take on this issue, for it was one teacher, my senior high-school English teacher, Jack McFarland, who turned my life around.  He had a no-nonsense demeanor, and he had the most demanding curriculum I faced in four years of high school.  But we students knew he gave a damn, that he worked us because he believed in us, and he demanded more of himself - in terms of hours spent closely reading our papers - than he did of us.  After a while, hungry for adult connection, I wanted to connect with him.

In Lives on the Boundary, I reflect on this interweaving relation and learning.  Six or seven years after Mr. McFarland's class, I found myself working with children, trying to find my own way in a classroom:

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance.  You didn't just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk.  You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water.  Maybe nothing was "intrinsically interesting."  Knowledge gained its meaning, at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation of the kind Jack McFarland ... used to have with his students.  My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me.

Years later, I read John Dewey and came across this passage in Democracy and Education:

The more the educator knows of music, [he writes, using one area of study as an example] the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child ... [T]he various studies represent working resources, available capital ... [yet] the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and capacities.  (pp. 182-183)

We have a tendency in our culture to separate head from heart, particularly where education policy is concerned.  Our reigning discourse is a language of economic competitiveness and test scores.  No hint of care lingo there.  Unfortunately, the contrary view to this mainstream discourse sometimes lapses into a wariness about intellectual discipline and a romanticizing of young people's experience.

But it is the inextricable blend of heart and head that defines the best teaching, the touch on the shoulder that encourages another human being to take an intellectual risk.

Mike Rose, The Mind at Work, Possible Lives, Lives on the Boundary, public education, American workers, books, Penguin Books