To know as we are known Book

I've read this book twice. The first time through I was put off by what I perceived to be its piety. Not its turn to Christianity, a move I appreciated since I agree that the union with the spiritual or the universal cannot be abstract, it must be particular. Rather, I heard too many "musts" or in his language, I felt him battering me with his "oughts" (8). I complained about his tone which struck me not as suggestive but as mandatory. And his Christianity, I thought was symptomatic of his urgency, his desire to teach me something. I felt a bit annoyed with my friends and colleagues Andy and with Patrick for pushing me to read it.

But there was also much to like. And even if I thought I did not want to read it again, something compelled me to return.

The second time through, I must have been much more relaxed. Perhaps because I had expressed my complaints and gotten them out of the way. I began to think that I should have my own copy, perhaps teach it in my Writing and Criticism course, and share it with a few close, select friends.

Before I get to the benefits of this book, I am going to lay out its limitations. I want to say it in one sentence: Palmer's spiritual approach is nested neither in a political economy, nor in a political psychology.

What makes this book so appealing is that it makes me feel less alone. There are only two colleagues in my 31-year teaching career with whom I would dare to utter the following words: "We teach with love." I have feared being misunderstood as expressing something soft, Hallmark-like, Disney-like. And I have feared the misunderstanding that love in the classroom is really taboo. But Parker is clear that the love he examines and promotes is rigorous, demanding (9, 46). More like fire than like chocolate. I am especially moved by this line, "How can the places where we learn to know become places we learn to love?" (9). That is the right question.

Palmer misses that love is not only the solution to the problem of an objectivist pedagogy, it is also part of the problem. Love of routine, love of slavishness, love of the sources of our affection -- family, friends, nation, such love stops the student from moving into a spiritual community of knowing.

I understand that these are two aspects of love: the one that creates a learning community is rigorous and demands deep listening. But equally powerful, if not more, is a second kind of love which promises us warmth and comfort when we do NOT move towards certain types of critical knowledge. Some call it reification, some call it dogma, some call it socialization, some call it family life. Whatever we call it, it is, as the Lacanians say, sticky. This love keeps us from moving towards our greater curiosity, deeper community, and truth. As Palmer says, "we find it safer to seek facts that keep us in power rather than truths that require us to submit" (40).

Palmer ignores or by-passes the magnitude of this problem. Instead, he asks why we "choose" the lazy pedagogy, why such a pedagogy persists (39). Why do we act against our seeming better selves? Palmer's quick turn to answering these questions suggest to me the lack of deeper commitment to the question itself.

A second problem is what I take to be Palmer's emphasis on consensus, harmony, and reconciliation (111). While he is excellent on the centrality of tension and paradox (104, 111), I sense his desire to resolve and not to cultivate the kind of tension that promotes a dissensus.

Third, the villain in Palmer's presentation is objectivism, distancing. He has only one line about its historical emergence: "if the problem with primitive knowledge was the over-identification of the knower with the known, our problem is the estrangement and alienation of the two" (26). Yes, exactly. But I think we might need to excavate how and why it is that our estrangement and alienation was once the solution to the problem of primitive knowledge. And this "solution" is not without its charms and power, not least due to its ability to generate modern science and capitalism.

Fourth, I think Palmer wants to believe that he can still be the good teacher, the good person, the good Christian. In a world that is structurally stained, however, it might be that this posture betrays rather than realizes his hopes. Even the teacher who lives up to Palmer's highest ideals must still perform a kind of love that students will inevitably experience as a kind of loss and violence. Because learning is a kind of ferocity against a prior self. There is no way around this, I'd say. I am not sure Palmer is ready to confront this inevitability.

And yet there are gems here. So many that I want to list them:

- His emphasis on healing the world (8);
- The powerful work he derives from the monastic tradition which gives us: the reading of texts as a kind of sacred activity, the practice of reading and thinking as a kind of prayer, and the goal of creating communities of learning (17);
- That the link in all epistemological chains are not ideas and theories, but rather a teacher, a mentor, a guide (29);
- That the foundational unit of teaching, learning, and knowing are relationships (53);
- The essential relationship of "truth" to "troth" - a kind of fidelity and faithfulness (31)
- That in knowing the world, we are also coming to be known by it (36);
- That learning is about transformation and not-learning is about the fear of transformation (54);
- That we cannot learn without being in love (58);
- That as we read texts, they also read us (59, 62);
- That the classroom is, in fact, necessarily within the world (88); and,
- That we cannot begin to know ourselves without knowing the Hitler within us (102).


All these are ideas and practices in which I have been engaged and that have immersed me. But reading them on the page makes two differences. First, as I said, it makes me less alone by affirming that I am perhaps not randomly wild in my pedagogical trajectory. Second, it helps me to understand that I have always known this method and that I am being known by it; that my growth as a teacher has been somehow not been unsystematic.

The book has become a friend, an intimate. Something and someone with whom I can commune in a productive tension.