Should We Be Friends With Our Students?
Having been a teacher for more than eleven years now, I have been around long enough to see many good and bad things in the realm of student-teacher relationships. Thankfully, I have never worked at a school which had things go wrong between a student and teacher in the sense that it ended up on the evening news. I have known of that horrid situation happening in neighboring schools (even Christian ones). It is, of course, to be condemned in the strongest terms possible; teachers should never take advantage of a student sexually. Such people are, in my opinion, fit only for the gallows.
It is in light of the fact that such abuses exist that good teachers and administrators rightfully put protocols in place, set reasonable boundaries, and discourage too much chummy familiarity between students and teachers. Students are not our peers and the distinction between teacher and student ought to be firmly upheld and preserved (for the good of everyone in question). Students ought to have a certain level of respect and reverence for their teachers, they should see them as authority figures in their life, and they should not be as casual with them as they may be with their classmates. Teachers, for their part, should have a real respect for their students also, they should see them as their God-given charges whom their parents have entrusted to them to work for their good, and they should not be as casual with them as they are with their co-workers in the school.
Hopefully all that I have said so far is non-controversial. I think most morally aware adults would affirm the importance of the kind of separations and distinctions I have just outlined in brief. Even so, I have witnessed more than one teacher, in schools where I have worked, be dismissed (or have their contracts not get renewed) due to being overly familiar with students. These cases I allude to were not predatorial in nature, but simply foolish and immature. Sometimes teachers want, so badly, to be liked by their students that they begin to act as if they were peers and they forget their place as a teacher and, as a result, though no grossly immoral sin has occurred, they become wholly ineffective as a teacher. They also set themselves up for much bigger problems if they aren’t careful. The younger the teacher is the more especially careful he or she must be to not fall into this, but even older teachers are sometimes guilty of the same mistakes.
It is because of these good and necessary boundaries, which must be set up and affirmed and reinforced in the world of education, that most people will tell you, resolutely, that teachers and students cannot and should not be friends. Although I affirm everything I have just written about above, I have to say it is here where I disagree with this common notion. Not only can students and teachers be friends, I would argue that they must become friends if the teacher is going to effectively do his job. To state it even more emphatically, whomever a teacher fails to befriend he also fails to teach.
Draw a line in your mind between the terms “peers” and “friends,” for they are not true synonyms. Though one may both be a peer and a friend, and though such friendships are highly desirable and beneficial, one can have important kinds of friendships with people who are not your peers. The idea of being a “peer” carries the notion of equality of station in life; being associated by common rank. Students are not the peers of teachers. Students are subordinate to teachers. The term “friend,” on the other hand, refers to two people who are not at odds with each other (friend is the opposite of foe), they do not wish harm to each other but, rather, they share a common interest or common interests. Many peers are not friends, and many friends are not peers.
In C. S. Lewis’ book, The Four Loves, he describes friendship as follows:
Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” […] In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? — Or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?”[1]
Lewis describes what we might call the happy accident of discovering friendship in people we know or meet as we go about our lives. We typically call this “making friends,” but what we really mean is something more like “happening upon friends.” In the world of education, however, to “make friends” takes on a more literal sense. The role of the teacher in relation to his student is to actually make them into friends by guiding their affections towards what the teacher already knows to love. We are making friends, literally producing new friends, by showing them how to love, and why they ought to love, what we love, namely our discipline or subject. The teacher’s greatest aid to teaching is to love their discipline truly and contagiously. A well functioning school is a factory for the making of friends who love what we love.
In distinguishing between the kind of love “friends” have and the kind of love “lovers” have, Lewis said “Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up — painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other: that is, in opposite directions.” [2] If we take Lewis’ perspective on Love and Friendship to be correct, and I do, then in the classical Christian classroom (or even homeschool room) the goal of the teacher is to make students into lovers of the same things which he himself loves.
Not wishing to press the Lewis’ illustration to absurdity, one need not have eros (romantic feelings) towards mathematics, history, Latin, Logic, Rhetoric, etc., that would be a bit odd, but nevertheless the subject a teacher teaches should be his “beloved” in a real sense and his goal as a teacher should be to make his students into friends who desire to stand by his side and behold the beloved, with him, in awe. We have all surely had teachers who not only didn’t seem to like us much but also didn’t seem to like, let alone love, what they were doing or teaching. Could anything be less motivating to a student? What could more effectively make a student, who is disinterested to begin with, become a loather rather than a lover of some area of study than to sit under a teacher who does not appear to love them nor what he teaches?
Even in the case of a teacher who is of good will towards his students, if he does not love his discipline he will certainly not make new lovers of that discipline. [3] The teacher must love both his students and the disciplines he teaches if he is going to really be effective. The highest goal of a teacher is to love what he teaches in such a potent way that it draws his students into the allure. In fact, though a teacher must love his students, he should love what he teaches so much that the students nearly fade out of the picture as he gets lost in the love of the discipline.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you have clearly lost that person’s attention mid conversation? She started off looking you in the eye and listening, but soon she is looking over you and past you so intently at something else that you have to do the only thing that seems natural, you turn around to see what she is looking at? What has absorbed her so wholly? You just have to know.
Teachers should be like that. They should love their students, they should want what is best for them, but they should also be so absorbed in what is true, and good, and beautiful in the disciplines they are teaching that they almost (almost) forget there are any students. They should be completely enchanted and entranced by their discipline because they love it so much. And as they stare beyond their classroom into the ethereal mists of wonder. What is bound to happen? Only what is natural. The students turn away from the teacher, and away from each other, and they join his gaze to look at what he is so captivated by and…soon…they become captivated as well.
When the teacher has fully convinced students to love alongside him he has made them a true friend, fellow lovers of the other.
Editor’s note: This article is a lightly edited version of the original from Study the Great Books and is republished here with permission.
Endnotes
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, Ch. 4.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis, “Equality” (1943)
[3] It’s noteworthy that in the modern university, and I am afraid many public schools, the teacher teaches his students only to love hating the discipline. Deconstruction is the name of the game and the pleasure is a sadistic one which loves only taking apart, discovering (or inventing) where it is racist, misogynistic, and oppressive rather than beholding it as an object of love and wonder and finding where the good lies in it.
