What we need is a hierarchy of care

In which I introduce myself and my work

Many years ago — really, eons ago — when I was in my doctoral program at Stanford University, I went to a party. I found myself talking to a guy from the Stanford business school. I asked him something I’d been pondering for a while.

“Why,” I asked him, “don’t we base our economy on care rather than money?”

My memory at this point becomes cartoonish. A panicked look from the guy and a little “blah blah blah.” Then, in my memory, he cocks his arms back, raises a leg, and psheew! (that's the sound of an email being sent) he takes off. The curly lines indicating high speed linger behind him.

Now I know how to protect myself from b-school types.

But I was serious. And still am. I have thought a lot about relationships, those delivery systems of care — how to learn from them, how to attune them, how to use them to promote growth and understanding of oneself and others. Initially as a teacher and teacher educator. Now also as a psychotherapist. And as a consultant for educators at all levels.

My focus during and after graduate school, where I studied language, literacy, and culture in the School of Education, was schools. In fact, my sole professional focus up until right about now has been schools. My dissertation, which was called “Spontaneity in the Classroom: A Systems View of Teachers’ Knowing-in-Action,” suggested that teachers’ knowing is emotional and fully embodied as well as intellectual. (That was a fairly radical stance eons ago.) My consulting, which I call emotion work and “psycho-coaching,” starts with teachers’ emotions as crucial data about students’ learning, which emerges, I insist, from relationships. My philosophy of education, which blends psychoanalytic and complexity theories, views teachers as powerful developmental partners to their students and schools as holding environments in which all students — and teachers, and administrators, and maybe even parents — get to grow to their fullest.

I also see schools as hierarchies. Necessarily. But not hierarchies of blind power, of rigid top-down anxiety-driven mandates. Hierarchies of care. Where teachers care for their students and each other. Where administrators care for the teachers and students and each other. Where someone like me cares for the teachers and administrators. Where someone else cares for me.

And where, importantly, everybody wants to be the best person, the best care-giver and care-receiver, they can be. Where everyone, in short, is growing and learning, not just the students, and where everyone feels held firmly and compassionately. Where relationship skills, which are the engines of all lasting learning, are valued and actively cultivated through everyday action and supported reflection. Where SEL — Social Emotional Learning — isn’t a curriculum but an all-inclusive devotional practice.

Amazingly, I have been able in the past few years to make a modest living doing my psycho-coaching. I have helped individual teachers make it through tough personal times. I have helped dysfunctional teacher and administrator teams repair and reconnect. I have run what I call Teacher Support Groups in which teachers weekly unpack and reframe unnerving teaching experiences and, as a result of their fresh psychodynamic understanding, transform themselves and their relationships at school (and at home, they report). I have given innumerable workshops and talks. And I have maintained a blog for teachers where I promote this perspective, hoping to inspire and buoy teachers in their relentlessly difficult jobs.

But it’s not just teachers who need support in caring for people who are taking risks — that is, learners and growers. It’s not just teachers who are invaluable developmental partners. It’s not just teachers who are burning out because the energy they pump out is not being regenerated fast enough.

We all need the psychodynamic perspective. We all need support in being the best human beings we can be. We all need to take our place in a hierarchy of care, where we are whole-hearted learners as well as dedicated developmental partners. In a country that has shown itself to be a piss-poor holding environment for anyone who isn’t white, we need to assiduously and deliberately change it. So our species as a whole, leaving no one out, can evolve and improve and keep the unearned yet sacred privilege of living healthily on this planet.

That’s my belief, anyway. I know it’s extreme and pie-in-the-sky. But I also know the psychodynamic approach works. It works with teachers. It works with parents. It works with spouses and children. It works with leaders. It has worked miracles with me.

Starting with my next post, I’ll start showing you how.