The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life

by Parker J. Palmer

it's the person within the teacher that matters most in education,

virtue of their positions, can project darkness or light on the people around them. They, therefore, bear a special obligation to tune into the dark and light forces within themselves. Otherwise, they will do great harm.

“take us beyond ourselves to become healers of a wounded world.”

Good teaching requires self-knowledge: it is a secret hidden in plain sight.

Teaching and learning are critical to our individual and collective survival and to the quality of our lives. The pace of change has us snarled in complexities, confusions, and conflicts that will diminish us, or do us in, if we do not enlarge our capacity to teach and to learn. At the same time, teacher-bashing has become a popular sport. Panic-stricken by the demands of our day, we need scapegoats for the problems we cannot solve and the sins we cannot bear.

Reduce teaching to intellect, and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world.

the way we and our students feel as we teach and learn—feelings that can either enlarge or diminish the exchange between us.