What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught?
Active listening.
Not simply hearing. We already know how to do that, at least those of us who can. I mean listening as an act of attention. The deliberate decision to turn toward another person and make an honest effort to understand what they are trying to communicate before deciding how we feel about it.
We teach children how to read. We teach them how to write. We teach them how to speak in front of a classroom and defend an argument. We test comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, mathematics, science, and history. Somewhere in all of that, though, we seem to assume that listening will take care of itself.
I am not convinced it does.
I have a deaf grandson and a blind great-nephew, and both have complicated the way I think about words like listening and seeing.
My grandson listens with his eyes.
That sentence alone should make us reconsider what listening actually means. He watches faces, expressions, hands, posture, movement. He pays attention to things many of us miss because we are busy preparing our response before the other person has finished speaking. He reminds me that listening was never solely about hearing in the first place.
My great-nephew has taught me something similar from the other direction. He is blind, but that does not mean he moves through the world without perception. If anything, he has made me think more carefully about what seeing actually means. Sight is biological. Seeing is something deeper. It requires attention, interpretation, memory, context, and the willingness to notice what others overlook.
Those of us with functioning eyesight can be remarkably careless with it. We look without observing. We pass people, places, expressions, and moments without ever really registering them. We assume that because something entered our field of vision, we saw it.
That is not always true.
Sometimes it takes a blind man to teach us how to see.
The same is true of listening.
A person can hear every word and understand almost none of what was said.
Maybe schools should teach that distinction.
Imagine if active listening were part of the curriculum from childhood onward. Students would learn how to repeat another person’s position accurately before disagreeing with it. They would learn to ask, “Is this what you mean?” before charging ahead with an assumption. They would learn that understanding someone does not mean surrendering their own position.
Perhaps most importantly, they would learn how to recognize when they might be wrong.
That may be the part we struggle with most.
We often enter conversations believing our job is to defend what we already know. We gather evidence while the other person is speaking. We construct rebuttals. We wait for an opening. Sometimes we are not listening at all. We are simply reloading.
Active listening interrupts that impulse.
It asks us to remain present long enough for another possibility to enter the room.
That does not mean everyone will agree. I am not suggesting that teaching children how to listen would somehow eliminate conflict, prejudice, stubbornness, or plain old foolishness. Human beings have been finding reasons to argue with one another since somebody first pointed at something and another person said, “No, that’s mine.”
Listening is not magic.
People can understand each other perfectly and still disagree.
But disagreement might become different if understanding came first.
Imagine what that could mean in a classroom. Then imagine it in a marriage, a workplace, a friendship, a neighborhood, or a family sitting around a dinner table. Imagine what might happen if people entered difficult conversations trained not merely to speak clearly, but to receive clearly.
We live in an age that has given us more ways to communicate than any generation before us. We can send words across the world in seconds. We can broadcast our thoughts to hundreds or thousands of people before breakfast.
The technology improved.
I am not certain the listener did.
Maybe that is because we have always treated listening as something automatic instead of something that requires practice.
Will teaching active listening fix the communication breakdown we seem determined to perfect? Of course not. But that is another conversation for another day, isn’t it?
My grandson listens with his eyes.
My great-nephew reminds me that seeing is larger than sight.
Perhaps they understand something many of us should have been taught much earlier: attention is not passive.
It is a discipline.
And maybe schools should teach us how to practice it.
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Absolutely beautiful and true. I wish schools would teach this as part of the curriculum. I would hope that a talented educator would take it upon themselves to incorporate this in their mannerisms and lesson plans. Active listening is a true art indeed.
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Kiki, it’s wonderful hearing from you again. I hope you’ve been well, my friend.
And I think you touched on something important when you mentioned the educator incorporating active listening into their own mannerisms. Children learn from what we model as much as what we formally teach.
We can put “active listening” somewhere in a curriculum, but if the adults in the room constantly interrupt, dismiss, or simply wait for their turn to speak, the lesson has already been undermined. Maybe teaching it begins with demonstrating what it feels like to actually be heard.
As always, you’ve given me something else to think about. Thank you for stopping by and adding your thoughts to the conversation. It really is good to hear from you again.
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I love chatting with you albeit in the brief comments. This would be a wonderful topic to lecture on in college courses so that teachers could incorporate this into student teaching.
If I had the time to do it all over again..
❤️
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What a lovely post Mangus. One of the groups I attend has some deaf attendees. They are all smashing people, and make themselves understood to us with normal hearing as well as each other. I try to converse with hand movements and one has shown me some sign language which fascinates me.
Teaching in schools is so different than when I was a kid. So much is done on computers, and I wonder if that is encouraging students to retreat into themselves rather than mix with each other. Hubby used to be the IT guy for a large secondary school, and the classes were all the same…………. sit in front of a computer screen whilst the teacher sat at the front desk……………. one apparently used to do her knitting! The system is letting the kids down.
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Thanks, Di. I love that you’re learning some sign language from the people in your group. There’s something wonderful about meeting someone partway rather than expecting them to do all the work of crossing the distance between you.
I wonder about the computers as well, although I’m hesitant to blame the technology itself. I spent enough years working with technology to know that the machine usually does exactly what we teach it to do. The question is what we’re teaching people to do with the machine.
A computer can open a classroom to an enormous world of information, but if thirty students are staring at thirty screens while nobody is really interacting with anybody else, we may have gained access to the world while losing something important in the room.
And the teacher knitting at the front?
Well, damn. 😂
Perhaps that brings us right back to the essay. Attention has to be practiced, but somebody also has to demonstrate what giving another human being their attention actually looks like.
Thanks for sharing this, my friend.
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🙂 My pleasure.
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Youve touched on so many avenues lanes levels here. I have impeccable hearing. I also listen closely. What someone says is valuable to me. When I read something, it’s much the same. Having had a work place accident, lost my eyesight for a year, until they found out the cause and how to heal my eyes. Scars remain and I caaaaan seeeee, kinda sorta. Had to hand in my driving license of course. At first it was a case of going to have to warn you, unless we find a solution, you will be permanently blind. As a result, my eyesight is severely diminished and the ability to see dependent on the moment…sometimes as far as the door, sometimes half way between, sometimes as in todays effort, my nose is pressed to the screen so I can read at all. I depend on the sound of a person’s voice to tell me what they are really thinking and feeling because you can’t hide emotion…it seeps out regardless. Hence the typos because I’m never sure I got it right and I get tired when I try to re=read everything I write. The one thing that was devastating was not being seeing the stars and the moon becoming a blob in the sky. I completely understand your post and thank you for it. I hide from the truth; very few know how desperately poor my eye sight is, even my family. Not that it’s shameful, it is what it is, but it’s painful to live with. Colour and texture and fabric mean worlds. Expressions on people faces, those tiny tells explain what they are about even if they cant or won’t explain their position and honest throughts. Anyway, thank you, for this look at the truth of it all! :_
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Mangus, I must insist that you do an act of patriotism and public service and send this blog to Congress.
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