Imagine the classic sports movie. In it a rag-tag group of young players, who have never won a championship, are presented with a new coach. This coach is different. He isn’t nice. He yells, he insults. The training is brutal. Players get punished for every mistake, no matter how slight, or unintentional. “We’re going to practice this until we get it perfect!” he frequently tells them. Eventually they are transformed into a championship team. In fact not only are they successful in their sport, but they even start to turn around their personal lives.
Anyone familiar with the genre could easily name multiple examples of this story without trying. What this type of story exemplifies is a specific pedagogy that I call the corrective style.
The principle behind this style is one of perfectionism. There is a perfect form the teacher has in mind, and any deviation from that form must be caught and stopped by the teacher. In a sense it treats the player, or student, as an unguided and errant force, one which is ruled by entropy and randomness. This randomness must be confined and directed towards the proper form. It is like a shrub used in topiary, which simply grows with no regard for the desires of the topiarist, but simply has various random inclinations which must be directed. Pain is an essential part of this teaching method; not out of masochism, but because there is no other option; one must constantly prune the unwanted growths that lead away from what one has in mind.
But what makes us think the shape we cut the plant is the best one? The coach might force his players to shoot a certain way, and catch a certain way, and run a certain way, and he'll punish them for doing it differently until he's stamped out all resistance and it becomes automatic, but why did he choose that way to shoot, catch, and run? And what if a player wants to switch sports? We never see that conflict in the sports movie of week. We can force a thing into the form we want, but to be blunt, what if we're wrong? What makes us so confident we know exactly which form to force? If only half of all social science studies can be replicated then what makes us sure that we're better than random?
Let's take it one step further: if all our natural impulses are random, then why do we think that we know better than randomness? What exactly pulled us out of randomness? And remember, life is not as easy to test as sports. In sports if you use an ineffective style then you'll lose against the more effective one. How will you even know if you're using the wrong style when raising a person? The goal in raising a person is not simply given to us like in a game of basketball.
This much is clear; the corrective style is not done for the good of the student. The good of a thing is what is good for that thing. In other words, it comes from the nature of the thing itself; that end that a thing is naturally inclined towards. But the corrective style is about an imposed end. A bush, when examined according to its nature, desires to grow, it desires sunlight, it desires water, it desires to reproduce; it does not care at all about looking like a swan, that is an end imposed by the gardener. There is nothing inherently good for a bush about looking like a swan.
The other style of teaching I call the cultivating-style. This style is not focused on correcting errant behavior until only good behavior remains, but on discovering and encouraging the internal tendencies without the student towards the goal. It should be noted that by "encourage" I don't mean enhance, or prod along, but to remove things which might impede growth, and making sure that those circumstances which are necessary for growth are present. It is not about giving to the student a desire, but about nurturing the desire the student already has; focusing on the internal inclinations of the student, rather than making external demands.
This style does not seek to implant the proper tendencies into the student. One might also call it a desire-based style, because it assumes that the student has an inherent inclination towards good ends.
The cultivating style takes as its end what is natural for the student. In this way it is more free; not simply because it does not force the student, but because the student's movement is in accordance with its own inclinations. This style therefore takes on the role not so much of a master, but of a guardian. It primarily watches out not for those internal elements which must be restrained, but those external elements which would restrain or harm the student. Its corrections are more about removing those obstacles which might hinder growth, but also knowing what obstacles should be allowed in order to inspire adaption in the student, as some growth depends on resistance, but again, only if we think there is something in the student that can adapt to resistance.
The mistake would be to think that this is a difference of strictness versus kindness. It is not. Certainly the corrective style requires strictness to work, though plenty of those who ascribe to that style are not at all strict (and so fail at the style they have chosen). But strictness is not the point. What is true is that the cultivation-based style allows for more freedom than the corrective-style. But this is not truly a lack of strictness, anymore than a soccer coach is less strict than a track coach because he doesn't make his players run in a single lane. The corrective-style is properly said to be more restrictive, but true strictness primarily has to do with the teacher, not the student. Strictness properly describes how consistently a teacher keeps to their principles; one might therefore use either style and be strict or not strict.
Now this is not to say that the cultivating-based style would forgo any possible correction. It is possible that certain maladaptations could need correction. But there are two important differences. The first is that it is understood that any correction is done with the goal of returning the student to his natural growth. In other words, correction should be looked upon as being out of the ordinary, just as medical treatment is not considered part of the normal functioning of the body, but rather something done in exceptional times, when it is beyond the body’s ability to recover on its own. So while some correction may have to be done first, it is never primary to the true goal, whereas correction is primary means of growth. The second difference (which follows on the first) is that in this style what is more important than correcting is teaching the student to self-correct. Because the basis for the student's actions are ultimately the student himself, what is sought is the proper self-efficacy, meaning it is ultimately desired that the student would not rely on a teacher for correction. So rather than just being taught what is wrong, the student is taught how to spot what is wrong, and how to fix what is wrong. Again, using the body as an analogy, while medicine might sometimes be needed to return someone to health, what is most preferable would be someone being healthy enough to heal without the need of medicine.
The advantages of the cultivating method are obvious, but it should also be obvious what the catch is. The catch is that it demands far more of the teacher. The teacher himself must understand and possess these qualities he hopes for in the student. Moreover he must understand what is proper to the student, and what is natural to the student, a task that is far easier said than done. The teacher must have some faith in the student, because the teacher is ultimately relying on the principle of growth to be one which is provided by the student, not the teacher.
However in another sense it is far easier, because it does not require that the teacher be the originator of the correct form, but only to recognize it. And while the teacher must learn to recognize the correct form, the movement towards that form is done voluntarily and freely by the student, rather than something forced onto a resisting object.
This is not to suggest that there is nothing required of the teacher, or that the student is completely unreliant on the outside world. That the growth of the student comes from the nature of the student does not mean the nature of the student might not depend on things which are outside of the student, just as the growth of he body, although determined by the DNA of the body, still relies on food, water, and air, shelter and other things. Contrast the topiary with the garden. In a garden the gardener must do various things to cultivate his plants. He has to prepare the soil, and provide water, and shelter the plants from too much sun or cold, or insects and animals. However none of what he is doing is making the plant grow. Rather it is doing everything necessary to prepare for the plant’s growth, but he must simply have faith that the plant will, when given the right circumstances, grow on its own.
There is another difference between the two styles that might not be obvious, and it is related to the perceived strictness differences of the two styles. It is perfectionism. Often when people think of pursuing perfection, they think of perfectionism, which is the natural result of the corrective style. But the corrective style does not seek after perfection any more than the cultivating-style. It is not different in that it wants the student to be as perfect as possible; both styles desire that. But in order to achieve this, the corrective style requires the student do everything perfectly. There is no acceptable achievement less than perfection in how a student performs; there is no such thing as an acceptable error because any deviation from perfection is nothing but destructive of the goal. But the cultivating-style does not consider a lack of perfection a problem, because the cultivating-style does not look for perfection, but direction. If a student does something imperfectly, it is acceptable if they still show signs of progressing towards perfection. Indeed, doing things improperly might even be a part of progressing, not just because it happens necessarily, but because it actually can encourage growth. If one is learning to bake then one learns more about what proofing does if they under-proof their bread than if they get it right the first time. But in the corrective style, corrections are necessary, but never wanted. There is nothing to learn from doing something incorrectly in the corrective style, because there is no fundamental difference to the student between the wrong way to do things and the right way to do things.
How would the cultivating style instruct? It would leave out "should." Not, because as some people rashly assume, because "should" does not truly exist, but because it's an end, and this style does not try to decide the end. It is not that this style is not concerned with shoulds, it's that because the end is what is natural, instead of instructing in what the proper end is, it instructs in how to reach that end.
This is all very abstract, but what does it mean in practical terms? In practical terms, what is hard is not figuring out what goals are good. Rather it's in seeing what leads to what goals. We assume the end does not need to be taught, because the desire for the right end is innate within the student. But what is not innate is by what method one reaches an end, because such a method will depend on many complex facts not known by the student. In the same way someone might know they want to go to Dallas, but how one gets there will be completely different if they're in Houston vs London. So the teacher's role is to show what choices lead to what outcomes, and more generally how one can learn for themselves what outcomes result from what choices. But the goal is not to tell the student what they should want, but rather what choices will lead to what ends, and what those ends truly entail. But desiring the end is left in the hands of the student.
