Ginott's Letter To Teachers

I was listening to a discussion this morning about how someone like Assad, a trained doctor, who has sworn the hippocratic oath, could be capable of such inhumanity toward the Syrian people.

It made me think about the inhumanity displayed every day in our own country against people with disabilities, some deeply vicious inhumanity from people in the form of hate crime, and a mundane and insidious inhumanity from the bureaucracies and systems designed to deliver support to people with disabilities.

I remembered this poem written by Haim Ginott back in 1972, that describes why merely educating people is not enough.

Dear Teacher,

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:

Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

Children poisoned by educated physicians.

Infants killed by trained nurses.

Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.

Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

We tend to believee that a good education somehow makes us better people. Certainly in human services there's a very strong culture of valuing people's qualifications. But if those qualifications become a barrier between us and our humanity, then something is going wrong.

What helps us become more human? How do we prevent ourselves from being well educated, highly efficient agents of dehumanisation?