When I asked Concord Academy English Department Head Sabrina Sadique about the meaning of education, she began by talking about its etymology—“to lead out.” This could mean discovering a student’s inner spark and leading it out: helping the student harness it, amplify it, and share it with the world. On a collective level, education means that we are constantly inquiring about the world and our inner selves and examining the close relations of these two perspectives. For Sabrina, education also translates to these questions: “How do I create the conditions whereby a student can be a more aware self-educator? And how does that self-education translate to educating others?” Indeed, we are all students, and teachers too, as we constantly share from our own infinite reservoir of lived experiences.
Finding connections is an inherent part of education. Even as a secondary school student, Sabrina was always fascinated by connections between disciplines and wondered how concepts specific to chemistry and physics moved between the two fields. Later, as she studied English, her inquiries expanded to include the Humanities. She examined how languages move from one geography to another, how they interact with culture until they become a part of it. Her own path as a student spanned from her native country, Bangladesh, to here in the US. In her daily speech, vocabularies of science are often extended to explain ideas in literature and life. She is always interested in how things move through different systems.
“We construct systems in many ways,” Sabrina explained, “just as we do for time. We divide a day into twenty-four hours and each hour into minutes and seconds. Then, we create structures based on this system to organize our lives. But we are so often rushed and confined by this system that we ourselves created. For example, in education, homework and assessments are timed. Even our life is timed.” Sabrina wishes for her students to see that systems can be purposeful, while also being able to see through the constructs and dismantle them when necessary.
Another system we create is social hierarchy. For Sabrina, inequality in the larger world right now means that all of us, as members of society, must work much harder to level the field. She hopes that new generations of students who enter the workforce can have the agency to disrupt the status quo and ensure that everyone has equal access to resources. “My job is to sharpen your capacity to see through things, teach you now, equip you with scaffolds for that equilibration to happen in the future,” she says.
Equity is central to education. Sabrina believes that everyone should have equal access to knowledge. Educators (and every individual) have the responsibility to rebalance the system. “An epiphany in a classroom is always a two-way street,” says Sabrina. “You’re coming from your own situatedness—the context in which you were born, the languages you speak, all the different parts of you that have synchronized to bring you here. Your story is different from mine, which means there’s room for me to learn from you. And so I do love the fact that [education] feels like a conversation among equals. And it’s not by age, [or] by hierarchy between teachers and students. Learning happens in a state of reciprocity, through a deep and mutual regard for each other’s imagination.”
The learning process is really a collaboration between teacher and student. After the teacher explains a specific concept, the next stage is for the student to reflect and recognize these concepts within themselves, so that they can then discern them manifesting in various forms throughout the world. In my first Sophomore English class, Sabrina explained poetry in terms of breath. I remembered my own experience practicing calligraphy and my earlier perplexity at the concept of breath in Chinese culture. I remembered the wind, which I always loved. Suddenly, it all came together, when calligraphy and wind all turned to poetry, breathing rhythm in every part of the earth.
Ideally, by such a diffusion process, a student expands concepts learned in class to everything in life, and vastly different subjects and systems become interconnected. When the inquiries go deep enough, even souls are connected, as Sabrina says: “We’re all asking the same fundamental questions: why do we exist? How do we exist better? How did consciousness develop in such a way that inquiry and self-inquiry became fundamental to our existence?” And such is education—all-encompassing, heartfelt, and rooted in shared dialogue.