One of my favorite books is The Gift by Lewis Hyde. In it, Hyde proposes that artists (and let’s use that term broadly) are forever going to be at odds with our culture because they live in a different kind of culture and economy. Hyde writes that today’s society is a commodity culture: I give you money, you give me something back, and we’re even – the relationship is complete.
Hyde says that artists really live in a gift-giving culture – someone gives a gift without worrying about being repaid. The gift he says “goes around the corner”. The belief of the participant in a gift-giving culture is that things will even out – they act on that faith. And their giving is a symbol of their health and wealth. When you give a gift it’s not immediately compensated – it would be crass to do so. If someone brought you a bottle of wine because they know you like red wine, you wouldn’t give them ten bucks so you’d be even. You let it be a gift.
When the gift is given, a relationship is established. It’s that web of relationships that marks a gift-giving culture. If all artists were worried about is whether they’d be compensated fairly, they’d never create anything, or they’d never let their art go out into the world. Most art isn’t compensated. And then they would dry up and stop creating. That does happen to artists who become bitter about the difficulties of being an artist.
Hyde’s book is an affirmation for those people who can’t help but create, even if their work isn’t compensated or appreciated.
But I’ve been thinking that the concept of a gift-giving culture also makes sense in a learning community – whether it’s a public school, or a university, or a night class, or a guitar lesson.
There’s a structure of finance, and numbers, and measuring in many learning environments (school budgets, testing, grade point average, blah blah blah), but the deeper structure is the relationships established. Teachers, wanting their students to learn, don’t measure their hours, or make a mark on some ledger every time they do something to make sure they get paid back. (That’s why “work to rule” in contract disagreements seem so distasteful to us – we inherently know that teachers aren’t just selling widgets and feel they shouldn’t care about money.) Students are eager to please the teacher- and for many of them, there’s no idea of the money behind education – what they see is the people offering their time and care.
The good learning places I go to are filled with evidence of their being gift-giving cultures. Children bring in cupcakes and teacher presents. They happily wipe the blackboards or write get-well cards to sick teachers or other students. Math teachers show up at piano recitals; English teachers give books from their own libraries to interested students. All teachers buy supplies for which they aren’t repaid. These are all gifts, given freely, without thought of compensation. There is no way we can untangle the web of relationships that form in a learning environment.
And so, teachers and learners are up against the same problems as artists – when someone wants to start measuring everything, there’s bound to be confusion. Teachers have to make a living, and so have to live some kind of divided life – most won’t make what they “deserve” because they’re participating in a gift-giving culture. And when the bean counters succeed in presenting themselves as the arbiters of good educational practice, the gift giving suffers.(Wow, that was a long way to get to the question of testing, but….)
Schools make a lot more sense to me when I look at them as gift-giving cultures, not as some model of corporations with hierarchical structure.
It would be interesting to extend this idea to health care and see how it leads us to think about insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants. Medicine has been called an art… Maybe in addition to the NEA we need an NEH(ealth)C(are)?
It’s absolutely right to expect teachers to be doing their jobs primarily because they love the gift culture you speak of. They love their students, love to watch them learn, enjoy the process, etc. Otherwise, most of them could be doing something else and getting compensated for it in a bigger way.
It can be unfair, however, to expect teachers to give, give, give, and get nothing, nothing, nothing in return. Hence, teachers’ unions serve an important role in making sure people in the profession are indeed earning a living.
You only have to go back to the last century, before teachers had unions and spoke up about their pay, to see how unfairly they were treated.
Now, if only we could establish a “living wage” for artists and figure out how to value their work as well!
I like this Bill. It works because the “relationship” piece is hard wired into the “learning” piece. If one were to teach “just for the money” the learning would not take place.
Keep us thinking!
jay
Bill:
I agree you have made a great connection between teacher and artist. I used to be director of an after school learning center where we worked 1-1, or at most 3-1 with kids who were struggling at school. Even though the job only paid the teachers $8 an hour, we always had an overflow of accredited teachers who would work with us in the evenings after they had taught all day. To a person they were all excited about being able to personally connect with students and not, obviously, concerned about the money or time. The same thing drives us artists to connect with people around us. Nice blog!
Wonderful perspective of teaching and learning. As an ex-teacher (though how can anyone consider themselves an ex-teacher) I would like to consider myself as a gift-giver. I would have to believe that most people that go into teaching or storytelling for that matter have the inner quality of being a gift giver. The unfortunate reality is that those that try to employ those gift-givers, use that quality to make it harder for them to feel good about it.
When you don’t give some recognition to the gift-giver, either in praise, or rewards (as in a decent salary) you are exploiting them.
True gift-giving comes from the heart. I do things because it makes me feel good. Having the “title” of teacher with the expectation that I’m going to do things for you because that is what all “teachers” are supposed to do makes it more difficult to feel appreciated for doing things because I wanted to.
On the other side I must say when I give gifts to people, whether it be time, help, presents, etc. I don’t expect for those people to gift me back in return. They don’t owe me one. If I felt that way, then I didn’t give them a gift, it would have been a trade.
Great acknowledgement of what teachers do and why they do it. You may already know that in Woonsocket, RI, teachers are being asked to teach 40 days without pay during the ’09-’10 school year and that some West Warwick, RI, teachers have not been paid for some days they taught during the ’08-’09 school year.
Thanks Bill,
I never thought of the gift-giving people, ‘what goes around comes around’ as opposed to those who do nothing unless suitably compensated; before as a “culture” but I have certainly lived among both and life is far easier to live with within the first mentioned gift-giving kind!
Certainly Teachers seem to me undervalued and under paid!
Artists in communities without money to put food, shelter etc into families certainly would have “the Arts” on a back burner someplace I would think. This is why Education should be free (to all students) … yet somehow…taxes? Teachers need paid! Perhaps Artists should be likewise as our creative sides need exercise also?
As Jay said Bill: Keep us thinking!