Care Conversations 4 | We Need to See the Truth About People
In the first week of this series, I mentioned that in my first year of teaching, my approach to discipline was founded on the belief that if I was nice (for nice; read indulgent) to students, they would automatically behave in good ways.
I can now see that my perspective was significantly flawed.
I was inadvertently reflecting the thinking of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, simply put, believed in the innate goodness of people. Sin was not part of his thinking, rather it was circumstances that corrupted a person. He would eventually claim that any behavioural problems in a child were caused by society or even parents, interfering in the natural development of the child’s personality. Ideas of authority, obedience, duty or obligation were not to be considered.
The natural outcome of this thinking is that we can always find someone else to blame for our poor behaviour or defective relationships; society, parents or life’s circumstances. There are interesting outcomes to this thinking. Teachers are renamed ‘facilitators’ – their role is to create an environment where natural goodness will flourish. We affirm people for everything. Even those things that are wrong. Parents can become either permissive and non-intrusive or ‘negotiators’. More of that later.
If you remember, in my early teaching career, I then lurched into an environment of ‘rules and penalties’. I was now inadvertently reflecting the idea that people are totally depraved and have no innate goodness.
The classroom environment would now be dominated by restriction, control and punishment. If I did not exercise this control, their natural tendency towards wrong behaviour would run rampant. This reflects an extreme and wrong view of ‘Total Depravity’.
The ‘romantic’ view that people are ‘vessels of goodness’ just waiting for the right environment in order to blossom is incorrect.
The ‘depraved’ view that there is nothing good within a person is also incorrect. There is nothing about us that has not been tainted with sin by sin, but we still bear the image of God.
If people are neither absolutely evil nor basically good, then we must ask ourselves how that informs our understanding and practise of discipline.
Blessings,
Brian