One of the Best Books for Teachers and Education Lovers ever written!

Introduction

An Open Field of Questions

Can we restore story to a world obsessed with data?

A few years ago, while this book was still just a few sketches, I met a teacher from Surry, England, who described our field’s basic conflict this way:

Teachers start feeling like their own stories don’t matter and that their primary role is in reacting or responding to the inspectors’ standards. But when people are given a little time and space to do something creative on their own, you can’t believe how excited and productive they become. 

Tom’s story captures a conflict that can play out in contradictory ways. Like so many of our students, many teachers feel marginalized or trapped, like an underclass, and they either resign or remain passive. Other teachers feel a calling, more than ever, to find freedom for the expression of the human spirit. This conflict is universal inasmuch as it transcends boundaries of all kinds, be they political, social or economic. Rich school or poor school, in any hemisphere you’ll find stories where people are caught in this bind. But you don’t need to travel the hemispheres, because you can read and ponder these Socratic Stories. As these conflicts find either resolution or dissolution in the following pages, meaning and purpose unique to every reader will emerge. Each Socratic Story in this collection resolves in paradoxes or questions that you, its reader, face alone. They may leave you a bit off-balance. Nevertheless, I think you will find a few of them that are good companions for you.

David Brooks wrote, “Once people start speaking to each other and telling stories to each other, they generate alternate worlds. A story isn’t an argument or a collection of data. It contains multiple meanings that can be discussed, questioned and reinterpreted.” In our data-obsessed field of education, telling us more of the same and confirming more of the obvious, a good story allows us to see the world through clear lenses, and to ask bigger, more humble, and more open questions. These Socratic Stories are intended to challenge our deepest assumptions about what we do as educators (and students and parents) every day as we face the largest questions our field has to offer. Is the role of the teacher to civilize and dominate our students or to enlighten and empower them? Is our teaching an act of liberation or control?

Read the stories in any order you like. Fearless Teaching pulls from experiences from my own childhood and extensive public and independent school experiences, then moves out into the world further than I imagined I would, in an effort to listen better, and in this way to discover always more essential questions to ask. Years of searching for answers yielded bigger questions, and here are the biggest ones I could find:

• What if we evaluate our students and our schools by measuring happiness? Or kindness?
• Are we willing to risk our jobs in the pursuit of real and deepening connection with our students?
• Can open-heartedness prevail over the exhaustion and self-interest we often find around us?
• How do we manage to stay in this work?

The study of these questions keeps taking me back to a single question and many of the stories in this volume may lead you to it as well. It’s a simple question, Socratic, hence, inviting your answers:

• What greater expression of human freedom could there possibly be than teaching?

Answers are alive in our stories, however happy or painful they may be, however far we must travel to find them. Can we restore our passion for teaching through simple, Socratic storytelling? Let’s see . . .