I’ve started this year pushing myself to publish some of my little rambles. Some I want to try and properly publish, and others I think I just want to stop leaving in a Word document that sits unopened on my phone. Thoughts I’ve had, written down, and then somehow convinced myself nobody really needs to read.
I was recently asked by one of our experts by experience, after a session on labels, why I am so hopeful.
“Not everything is good. There are bad people.”
And whilst I agree, there is what we consider evil, there is poor practice, poor opinion and poor experience, I still struggle with the idea of giving up on people entirely. I do think there is something human at the core of us all, although I’m not naive enough to think humanity always looks kind. People hurt people. People hold views that are ugly, frightening or deeply unfair. People can become part of systems that strip the humanity from others and, sometimes, they know exactly what they are doing. But I also think people are built out of everything that has happened to them. The things they have been taught, the things they have survived, the things they have never questioned, and the things they perhaps have never had the opportunity to see differently.
At one point I wanted to take up theology. I spent a strange part of my childhood doing pretty much little else but memorising Psalms. I can still remember bits of them now. On reflection, I don’t think I was ever really searching for God in the way people might assume. I think I was searching for people. I wanted to understand what made us tick, what made us us, why one person could be full of kindness and another cruelty, and why we seem so determined to divide ourselves into groups. Us and them. Good and bad. Deserving and undeserving. Those who fit, and those who somehow sit just outside the line.
I think I’ve always been uncomfortable with how easily we reduce people. Sometimes it is probably easier to make somebody into a label than it is to really sit with the messiness of who they are. If somebody is simply ‘bad’, then we don’t have to understand them. If somebody is simply ‘difficult’, ‘lazy’, ‘aggressive’, ‘non-compliant’, ‘racist’, ‘ignorant’ or whatever other word we place over them, then perhaps we no longer have to ask what sits beneath it. That does not mean the label is always wrong, and it certainly does not mean harmful behaviour should be excused, but I do think something happens when we decide we already know everything we need to know about another person.
And I think that is part of why I have started to really enjoy teaching. It happens during this strange period where people are learning a profession, but they are also working themselves out. Some are questioning things for the first time. Some are meeting people whose lives are completely different to their own. Some are realising that things they were taught as children perhaps were not facts at all, but somebody else’s beliefs handed down to them. I find that really interesting, because there is an opportunity there. Not to tell people what they must think, but to help them become a little less certain that their own experience is the only way the world can be understood.
I think there is something quite moving in watching that happen. When somebody says, “I’ve never thought about it like that before.” When a student hears from someone with lived experience and suddenly something they understood in theory becomes much harder to keep at a distance. When somebody realises that the person they had already formed an opinion about has a story, a history, a reason, or simply a perspective they had never considered.
I don’t think this means every opinion deserves endless patience. Some views are harmful. Some are oppressive. Some need challenging clearly and directly. But I am not sure we get very far if our only response to people who think differently is to shut the door and stand on the other side of it feeling certain that we are right. Sometimes the hardest conversations are probably the ones most worth having.
Maybe that is where my hope comes from. Not because I think people are always good, because I don’t. Not because I think everyone will change, because some people won’t. I think it comes from not wanting to believe that any of us are completely finished.
We are still being made by the people we meet, the things that happen to us, the love we receive, the hurt we carry, the things we read, the things we question and the moments that make us stop and think, maybe I was wrong.
And perhaps teaching gives you the privilege of occasionally being there when one of those moments happens.
