Martin Buber and the Pedagogical Via Media
The classrooms of modern America are marked by various iterations of the age-old pedagogical conflict: should teachers lecture at their students to communicate timeless truths clearly and efficiently, or should they turn the classroom over to the students, trusting that collaboration will allow them to discover ideas for themselves? Though the gap between these two teaching methods seems unbridgeable, one potential resolution can be found in the educational philosophy of Martin Buber, whose understanding of dialogic education attempts to carve out a via media that balances between them.
An Austrian Jew born in 1878 who lived most of his adult life living and working in Germany (before being forced to flee to modern-day Israel in 1938), Buber developed a deep appreciation for man as a relational being. Though his philosophy admits existentialist tendencies, for Buber, individuals cannot exist in the absence of relationships – with other people, with objects in the natural world, and with God.
Buber’s most famous philosophical treatise, I and Thou, describes two primary modes in which these relationships can be conceived, namely as either the relationship of an I to an It (Ich-Es) or as the relationship of an I to a Thou (Ich-du). In I-It relationships, the two entities do not come to know each other in an authentic or meaningful way; it is a relationship of ease and utility in which each party treats the other as an object. In I-Thou relationships, however, the two beings truly encounter one another, experiencing a mutual subjectivity that serves as the foundation for ethics, culture, and human love.
True education, then, according to Buber, must seek to teach the child how to press past the utility of the I-It world and learn how to enter into the I-Thou relationships that form the basis of true human life. Pedagogically, this is not something students are able to learn on their own. The only way to come to understand the relationship of an I to a Thou is to experience such a relationship firsthand through the person of the teacher.
It is the teacher’s job, then, as Buber sees it, to cultivate an I-Thou teacher-student relationship in which both parties enter into a lived communion with the other. This cannot be done primarily through indoctrination, lecturing, or the preaching of dogma (as those methods lie squarely within the I-It realm), but it also cannot be done with a hands-off approach that shifts the teacher to the background and thus eliminates the relationship entirely. Rather, education must be mutual, a partnership between teacher and student characterized by trust, community, vulnerability, and openness to the presence of the other party.
Practically, the key to such a teacher-student partnership, according to Buber, lies in dialogue and conversation. While he might not have used the term “Socratic dialogue,” Buber was a strong advocate for a classroom setting based on interactive, teacher-led discussion where both teachers and students are active participants. Dialogue is an essentially mutual endeavor, requiring teacher and students to do things together – diving into great texts, exploring great ideas, questioning one another, sharing thoughts, and testing ideas in the crucible of conversation. It is both teacher-led and student-driven.
Buber’s emphasis on dialogue gives his insights particular relevance today. Not only does this form of education imprint upon students a vision for how they can respond to everything they encounter in the mode of I and Thou, it also encourages authentic conversations between students and teachers – something sorely needed in American classrooms today. Rejecting both the teacher’s lecture as “compulsory” and “authoritarian” as well as the student’s free exploration as “aimless” and “individualistic,” Buber’s approach bridges the extremes of dogmatism and hyper-subjectivity that grip our current educational landscape.
