Morphogenesis

As a teacher, I have sometimes asked myself, perhaps after a math class that went poorly: what in me is better replaceable (…by YouTube or ChatGPT…)? Will my role as high school physics and math teacher continue to be meaningful and relevant in the decades to come? Why, truly, am I doing this work which demands so much presence, preparation and peril?

But I take heart as soon as I remember that being a teacher is one of the most human vocations I could possibly agree to take on. No, this role I have will never become replaceable by some wittily named, AI powered, robotic teacher-simulator substitute. I am now utterly convinced of this. Of course, my work will integrate useful technologies, and fend off their harmful effects, as we keep innovating and re-structuring realities. Nevertheless, my sense for the profound importance of human-to-human relationality in a school setting is stronger than ever. Our Herculean task as teachers is to actually keep afloat and try our darnedest to keep walking the talk as the years roll by.

At its best, a school setting transforms into a holy place. School can become a sanctuary, holding sacred our shared humanity while drawing forth what is possible for the uniquely developing individuals it serves. If monasteries and temples were the main power-points of the sacred in the past, school has to become seen as such a place in present and future times. We teachers have to think of ourselves as torch bearers of small, Olympian metropolises of learning.

One way I have started to put it to myself is that a teacher’s role is basically to midwife the morphogenesis of young people. Just as small tree-shoots in a forest require mother trees, with healthy canopies and undergrowth, young people need the active presences of adults who can help them undergo a complex series of spiritual, social, cognitive metamorphoses. The teacher (or mentor’s) task is to engage attentiveness and intentionality toward young people, taking heed of their gradual – and sudden! – unfoldments. We are question askers. What does this student need, right now, to become one step closer to the self that lies hidden as seed-force within?

Just as embryos mature in one geometry and gesture before morphing suddenly into a different, but connected phase of development, so too do young people undergo regular, individuated spirito-physical morphogeneses. Like good midwives, teachers are present to assist that these continual metamorphoses occur in the best possible ways.

As Rudolf Steiner wisely pointed out, education is not a science but an art. It is perhaps the most subtle of arts in that the canvas is another human soul. When the soul of a teacher comes into contact with its pupils there arises an activity – interaction, relationship, improvisation – which is so alive that any sensitive teacher is rightly humbled by it. 

I often find in my own soul a balance of what might be described as obligation against trepidation toward the students I teach and engage with. This inner friction becomes part of a collaborative improvisation that is perhaps the essence of the art.

Every word I speak, every gesture, every choice of content, every attempt at bringing an experience, challenge, lesson, conversation, discussion, event, or practice, bears with it the feeling of being a two-edged sword. On the one hand, hopefully what is being brought has some positive effect because of the intention of bringing it. However, a lesson, or even seemingly a whole school day, can also fall flat. What I bring is bound, from time to time, to not quite meet the potential of the moment.

And yet the obligation stands: I have to show up, and try my best in the face of occasional failure, because their lives, their futures, depend on these metamorphoses taking place in a good way.

Another wise thing Steiner said was that the way we are as a person teaches our pupils far more than we realize. As important as the choices themselves may be, what is learned is primarily about the how of our bringing this or that content or choice.

Like any artist who is painfully aware of what they are trying to do versus what ends up landing on the canvas or finding its way onto the record, as a teacher I am painfully aware of how comparatively little I am able to translate my high hopes for myself and my students into exact moments of manifested inspiration. But when they do happen… they mean the world.

If one or two students in a classroom setting, or on a trip, or at a festive event, have a profound moment that becomes visible through their body language or even expressed in words, it feels like striking gold. We teachers go home happy, tell our colleagues about it, and get fresh energy to return the next day, wondering how we can have that happen again.

 When there are dry spells, when something is off in us or in our class, our best self nevertheless continues to plug along with a vague hope of soul-reemergence in a week or in a month or when a new subject is taken up. Like any artist, a teacher can  have ‘writer’s block’. I sometimes feel like a monastic who prays and meditates faithfully yet experiences no inner consolation for days. What a task to be a teacher! Humor is mandatory.

So no, I do not think that AI will ever replace real teachers. The sacred wholeness of the body of a school-sanctuary is not going anywhere either. If good teachers and schools are few and far between, I put the causal burden far more on the systemic issues which suppress genuine education than on the human beings who have tried to live up to their life task of contributing to the education of young people. 

Computers are useful for many things. So is generative AI. Robotics will become increasingly useful for utilitarian tasks. But computers will not become mothers, and AI will not become teachers. I hope that in time we will get over the current hypnosis we have of a world in which AI teaches us everything and we become survivalist cockroaches reacting to its superintelligence. The basic fault in such thinking is that we still have an archaic view of education, which centers information transfer and ignores the immensely complex activity of morphogenesis that takes place in every human being coming into the world. 

A human being who is born onto/into the Earth is such a miraculous event that we are only at the dawn of appreciating its profundity. How they morph and grow once here is just as wild a mystery. This then becomes the frightening task of a teacher: to become a soul artist, engaged in the morphogenesis of the young souls surrounding them, toward their brightest aliveness, their widest possibilities, their truest selfhood. No, dear students, dear future, AI will not replace us. Your teachers are here to stay.