- Self-adoration is the mental state that results from habituated excellence – from consistently setting and eclipsing high standards.Shanghai Daddy via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
A question from David Brodie, a man I much admire:
I was wondering how you would apply the principles of self adoration to the classroom, and how you would go about teaching the concepts of self adoration to children.
I’ve kind of winged it so far, really I was just riffing on the moment while explaining the basic rules of the classroom (“Respect..respect yourself, respect your classmates, respect your teacher, respect the room…but most important to me is to respect yourself..” then I gave an example of how holding yourself to a higher standard, in this case with cleaning up food after yourself, is respecting everything else below that). It just felt too collectivist and like I was missing the mark – the purpose should be the self adoration and self respect they achieve from holding themselves to a higher standard, but I felt like I was actually still just calling on them to respect everybody else first and making it sound like they were respecting themselves first.
What’s your take?
I’m doing some of this too, just now, in a much less organized fashion, working things out as I go on the basis of long-standing habits. What I have to offer are at best rules of thumb, though I am sure there is a perfectible theoretical praxis to be found here.
So first: Catch your kids doing something right. You know what praise-worthy virtue looks like, so praise it when you see it: “I love the way you organized your work. You clearly gave this a lot of thought, and it shows.” “I like the way you look after your little sister. She’s lucky to have a big brother like you.”
True visibility reflects the underlying DISC motivations of the person you’re seeing, so you should take those into account: “Jimmy likes for things to be perfect, and just look at all the detail in his project. But Johnny likes to get things done, and you can see how much extra work he did.” But visibility sees what’s missing, too, so it pays to praise gradually accumulating strengths where the child is weakest: “I know showing all the work is boring for you, but it’s fun – isn’t it? – to the see the proof of the theorem right before your eyes.” Children will gain strength on their own where they are already strong. The teacher’s job is to help them gain strength in the weak quadrants of the DISC profile.
Everything of didacticism is inherently manipulative: You’re maneuvering children, often despite themselves, to where they need most to go. So often I will say things I don’t wholly mean because the child needs to hear them: “Those glasses make you look so smart!” “Is that a bike helmet or are you an astronaut?” Children like to be prized, especially when they fear they might be mocked instead. The right praise can make a virtue out of necessity.
In Latin, I say educare est educere – to bring up is to bring out, to educate is to liberate. That ‘duc’ in there is the same one we find in induction, deduction, reduction, production. But it’s also the same ‘duc’ we find in duke – in the idea of leadership itself. Leadership is poetry first: To teach is to lead – and to lead is to lead somewhere. To lead children to better expressions of self-adoration is probably better done by your own example, rather than in an indoctrinal praxis.
The reason is the conflation of unlike things we run into all the time. When people hear the word egoism, too often their thoughts will run to the craven indulgence of crude appetites you probably already see too much of in children. This is very far removed from the rational self-interest I champion, but it can be hard to see the difference from the outside.
As a matter of theory, you can teach that the word rational means “proportionate to all known facts, within the context of a pre-established value structure” – and that is certainly worth learning. But you can show that much better than you can teach it in the example that you set for your students.
A good teacher models self-adoration in everything he does, this going back to Socrates and before. They didn’t use my language, but they sure did hold my frame. That by itself will do most of the job you want done, over time. By behaving as a self-adoring man, you will show your students how to behave as self-adoring kids.
In passing, I am proud to celebrate the fact that you are a man in school. Our children are starving for masculine frame, for the expressions of appropriate authority that can only emerge from confident, emotionally-secure adult men. Children need strong, self-adoring fathers, but this they may see too little of at home. As a teacher, you can never be more than a Dutch Uncle to your students – in loco parentis – but I think it does children good to see a man being manly in his value pursuits.
I’m a big fan of the Jesuit model of instruction. Not throwing basketballs at kids’ heads – save that for the ninth graders – but throwing their questions back at them. The only way to engender broad-based, DISC-spanning excellence – well-reasoned, well-executed, well-presented, well-meant – is to demand it – and to accept nothing less, while praising it to the skies once you get it. I am much the Jesuit myself, answering short questions with long essays, but this is how I learn, and discursive prose is how everyone learns for himself.
So I vote for turning questions into homework, and turning that homework into new reasons to celebrate excellence. Children don’t need to be told to want to be proud of themselves, but they need help with what to be proud of and how to get the job done. That’s the duke’s job.
And it ain’t a classroom without admonitory posters on the walls, so I’ll give you two admonitions to start with: “Choose admirably!” and “Pursuing my rational values is my only job.” You’ll have to make your own posters, but that’s the place, I think, for the bald-faced proselytizing. If you teach teleology in words, most people will tune you out. But if you spread your fertilizer with passive posters, you’ll snag their minds all the time – especially when they’re bored.
It’s hard to teach virtue when you spend too much time trying to mitigate the consequences of vice, so I think the very best Jesuitical question, for just about any sort for bad behavior, is this one: “In what way does that advance your interests? If the goal of human action is to achieve one’s own happiness, in what way does this promote yours?” There are no new lies, so the answer will always be Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make a Right. My move would be to cut that off mid-pretext, saying, “Very interesting. Write 300 words by tomorrow morning illuminating why that’s so.”
I speak with the luxury of not having to dig in and do any of this, but I think the ideal should be an environment where excellence is the expected norm, and where any weeds that dare to shoot up are pinched off right away. Self-adoration is the mental state that results from habituated excellence – from consistently setting and eclipsing high standards – and that classroom milieu will do more to teach rational egoism than you can ever do in words.
As with everything of self-adoration, the really big deal is you: If you make of yourself the teacher your students yearn most to live up to, you will have taught them everthing you want for them to know.
