Not too long ago I was listening to an hour-long presentation on Zoom about the importance of relationships on campus—relationships with colleagues, relationships with students. And when it got to the part about how this information should be applied in the classroom, what specific things I should be doing, my levels of irritation became almost unbearable.
Relationship, or what is meant by that term in this context, is a basic, primary, fundamental, and fundamentally human thing. Relationships are things that develop and grow and change organically. Educational institutions are machines. They are inhuman, mechanical, artificial things. There is no humanity lurking inside the procedural structure of an educational program. There is nothing human in a bureaucracy. There are no relationships in an institutional system, only connections, contacts, and conduits.
And so what the folks (institutional servomechanisms) running the presentation were doing, what they were trying to say, was something along the lines of: “OK, people are suffering a little bit because the relationship thing is missing because we are dealing with contrived connections and mechanical activities and there is nothing human in any of that (only they weren’t saying it that way), so what we need to do is we need to add ‘human’ back, and here are the techniques for doing that, here are the mechanical changes you can make to how you act within the system so that people can feel (experience the illusion) that there is some sort of actual relationship there; here’s how you can make relationship happen—how you can manufacture relationships.”
The absurdity of this should be glaringly obvious to everyone, and the fact that it’s not is more than just a little frightening to me.
