Education doesn’t happen on paper. It happens between people. | Elizabeth Alexander | Big Think

[Music] You know, if you look at great works of literature, I always thought about how in literature, in art and culture, there are tools for living. Right? And I think that one of the tools for living that you find in wonderful works of literature is that human beings are complicated and flawed. Human beings are not all one way. Human beings are best understood in their complexity.

And if only we had more of that in our day-to-day. I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be an excellent educator. Now that for the first time in my, you know, really most of my adult life, I was a journalist for a minute, but I've been a teacher, and now that's not my job anymore. So I've been thinking about what are the transferrable properties. In what are the ways that in our communities we think about mentorship? We think about empowerment. We think about sharing, not just to impose knowledge, but rather to share knowledge in a dynamic way that again is about the self-empowerment that comes from knowledge, from having an expanded mind, from having sharper tools for being able to evaluate contradiction and hold contradiction aloft.

Sometimes I think a good learning environment has to have, I think, the tenets that brave failure is preferable to a timid success, by which I mean I think our minds are great and powerful things. And I think that to have courage inform our thinking and to be able to go out, perhaps past where we may be comfortable, to go into the unknown between human beings and see where that takes us, to not stay safe in our own position, but to make it safe for other people to be able to share, I think that that's where we get to new ideas. I think that's where we get to brave ideas. I think that's where we get to solutions that we might not otherwise have found.

So fostering an environment where people can be brave and where ideas don't always have to be pristine, I think is very important. [Music]