The teacher – the person, who leads

(originally published in the mid 90s in Bulgarian; translated in the mid 90s)

A meandering worldly diagram, which The Homo sapiens-sapiens, after 50,000 years of its being, begins timidly to call a hoarded experience, is perceived by everyone as a twinkling path of knowledge. Some student who has suffered from examinations, could humorously characterize its disseminators, naming them teachers, without conjecturing to put them in one and the same melting pot with the delused propagandists, the bigoted adventurers and et cetera picturesque characters, who sprinkle – consciously or unconsciously – not less knowledge around themselves than these, practicing the teaching profession.

But the above-mentioned disseminators must be considered only as bearers of something, seen through and achieved by others, more raised up – by the bearers of the cognition, i. e., by the being able to designate the essence.

Of course each of us, if being asked, could produce with a certain mental endeavour a projection of his or her ideal image of the Teacher, – with a capital T – which is most often a complex hologram of implanted dogmatic-didactic elements and of a personal experience from the tender, that is to say, from the most impressionable age. This kind vision becomes gradually garnished with more and more incredible and dumbfounded details, thanks to the insisting gaze of the interviewer, until converted into a monstrous chimera, from which the legs of the average schoolmaster fail, and because of which s/he – gloomier and gloomier – starts to drive out his/her inferiority complexes over his/her unhappy dependents.

By saying “an average schoolmaster”, of course I have the European typified, more often badly paid, information-sellers in mind who, either by the heading of “curious facts”, or under the section “mandatory axioms”, foist on the youth their school check ups, and often – dexterously or not –their convictions.

The unexpected for the Homo sapiens-sapiens necessity of such impersonal teaching subjects deteriorated in Europe even their social status, which remained practically unaltered, even degraded, down the ages – from the loose sophists in Ancient Greece, throughout the educated slaves in the Roman Empire, the “flunkeys” from the Middle Ages, the pseudo-philosophers of the Renaissance, that much to the today’ s civil servants… No wonder that the original idea of interpersonal contact and spiritual influence is on its way to be entirely ousted by the interactive computer technologies and by Internet – the necessity of individualism, brought up by the pedagogues by vocation, isn’t especially pleasurable to the rulers of the contemporary consumer world. And notwithstanding nowadays each so called civilized country is tortured to this electronic pressure, the antitheses oblige us to mention the recent practice in Asia the students to search for their teachers, who, as hermits, philosophers, scholars, haven’t led themselves by financial or other material benefits when teaching.

I could now jump as a vortex to describe and to interpret the necessary qualities of the teacher – the unearthing of endowments, self-upbringing staminas, self-control, acting gifts, i. e. his or her pedagogical aptitudes – and thus to create my own variant of the hologram, for which I mentioned above. But this would be superfluous, because all these indisputably important talents, dosed and weight with imaginary measuring flasks till the hundredth of the millimeter, would have been worthless without the presence of a strong personality who wield them.

Because precisely the Personality is who makes the system, the process, the upbringing, the teaching and, ultimately, mould consciously or not a new personality through his or her indermediation between her and the cognition. If the teacher is dexterous, s/he is valuable… But if s/he is an artiste with all his/hers positive and negative queernesses, and morally strong, s/he is inestimable.

I give prominence to morally strong. Why? Because being an artiste means to emanate Energy, to create, and to influence the others consciously or not. And noone, least a featureless and a book moralist, who does not possess it, has the right to judge the designations, to which this capability is subjugated. That is to say, that if you possess this Energy and are able to control it, you have endowments for being a Teacher. The point is, that from the artistes, from these perceived, but not attained the cognition initiated persons, only a few can be Teachers. Because not everyone has the strength to meet the positive answer of the question “Can my student surpass me? Will s/he become better?” The artiste could not accept the philosophy of Nitsche, to hasten up the thorny way of the cognition and to forsake his/her student to get lost. Then the lost may die, but his/her spiritual death will not recline on the consciousness of the instructor, because the same has proved not being a Teacher.

But the Student may self-find himself. And may never forgive.