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Years ago, when I was working in alternative provision, I taught a student whom I simply couldn’t stand. He used to beat up his mum, he used to brag about conning people out of money and he spoke of others’ misfortune with cruel glee.

I always tried to see the best in my students, no matter what they’d done. I tried to, if not love them, then at least like something about them. Normally I didn’t have much trouble, even with young people who were guilty of terrible crimes. But in this student I couldn’t find a single redeeming feature.

The question, I realised, was: did this really matter? What was the problem with secretly disliking this boy, as long as I still did my best to get him through school?

All this got me thinking about the concept of “love” in education. As teachers, do we have an obligation to love, or even like, our students? And, if we don’t love them, does that mean we can’t still love teaching?

Let’s get the weird and awkward bits out of the way first. When we speak of loving our students, we clearly don’t mean romantic or sexual love.

Love is a complex emotion that comes in a variety of forms. For instance, the Ancient Greeks had many different terms for love, the four main words being eros (romantic love), storge (affection), philia (friendship) and agape (charity).

We know that relationships are inherently important in the classroom. have also shown that improving students’ relationships with their teachers positively affects attainment, social development and attendance.

But does this mean that love has a role to play in education? If there is some kind of “pedagogical love” that underpins classroom relationships, how should it best be described?

Teaching as ‘charity’

Perhaps the most obvious model for pedagogical love is agape. It is a word used by Homer to mean affection, but the dominant meaning nowadays would be “Christian love”, its Latin equivalent being “charity”.

In some ways, it makes sense to see teaching as a charitable endeavour. analysing what keeps long-serving teachers in the profession found that “altruistic reasons” were one of two key factors (the other being “perceived professional mastery”). and describe teaching as an “act of love” for similar reasons.

That said, the idea that teaching should be motivated by charitable love is vulnerable to distortion and exploitation.

When I started teaching, I was convinced that teaching was an act of charity. Looking back, not only was there something revoltingly arrogant about viewing my teaching in this way, but framing teaching in terms of agape is also problematic for the profession as a whole.

Schools are already increasingly being expected to shoulder the responsibility for all the ills of our society: poverty, mental ill-health, keeping children safe online - the list goes on.

If our primary understanding of teaching is as a form of agape, we risk turning the profession into what the writers of a Teach First report on supporting the next generation of early career teachers call a - and making it a career that only the most saintly would choose.

Teachers as friends and parental figures

In theory, teachers are not supposed to be friends with their students, nor should they take on the role of the parent.

But that’s not to say that friendliness and care are absent from the classroom.

Aristotle describes how philia, or friendship, occurs as a result of shared interests. Perhaps, in an ideal world, we could build a pedagogical relationship with students around a shared love of a subject - or even philosophia, the love of wisdom.

Of course, this seems a little idealistic. How often do we really bond with students through a shared love of wisdom? Perhaps it can feel like this is happening when the discussion is flowing and constructive arguments are pinging back and forth, but in those situations will every student be taking part? It seems to me that this ideal is a little exclusive.

Storge, on the other hand, describes familial love - the type of instinctual affection that, in the ancient world, was associated with a parents’ love for their children.

Teachers are, of course, always operating in place of a parent in terms of keeping children safe. Any adult who is formally entrusted with the care of a child has a legal responsibility to act in loco parentis.

But this surely can’t mean that teachers must feel affection in order to perform these 51���� duties. How can I be ordered to feel something and be held accountable for not feeling it? It would be nonsense, for example, to order someone to feel anxious.

‘Relationships are inherently important in the classroom’

Where, then, does this leave us? While there might be elements of charity, friendship and parental love in schools, this doesn’t quite capture what is truly going on in the pedagogical relationships we experience in the classroom, and that can be so beneficial to students if we take the time to foster them.

Pedagogical love, I would argue, fits better with a fifth Ancient Greek concept of love: xenia. This was what we might call “hospitality” or love of strangers. It was understood as being a kind of “ritualised” friendship, which described the responsibilities of the host to the guest (to provide food, drink, safe passage and so on) and from guest to host (for example, to be courteous, unthreatening and to provide news).

Pedagogical relationships seem to fit within this tradition. Despite the hours we spend with students, we part each year with no expectation of further contact. This temporary display of affection without true attachment mirrors the structure of hospitality and suggests to me that teaching can be understood as a kind of institutional love: part ritual, part duty, part gift.

For this interpretation of love to work for both parties - for both teacher and student to be able to fulfil their responsibilities within it - the relationship must have boundaries and be deliberate.

The problem is that love, like all emotions, is a tricky feeling to manage. It’s a powerful wind that is just as likely to take us off course as it is to carry us home.

Have you ever, for example, found yourself swayed by an excuse for a missed homework deadline from a student you like? How many times have you found yourself going above and beyond - to your own detriment - in preparing lessons or marking work? How often have you favoured the students who just happen to share your interests?

Institutionalised love

Given love’s tremendous power, it’s no surprise that this emotion is often institutionalised within society. Xenia, as we’ve just seen, comes with the boundaries of mutual courtesy, while romantic love is managed through the institutions of marriage and civil partnership.

Jewish theology, meanwhile, offers a clear vision of institutionalised love within which duties and deserts are accounted for, and where love can be commanded. Indeed, love is the greatest commandment of the Jewish faith: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

Jon Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, describes this covenantal love as a love nurtured and structured by service and obligation. The difficulty with feelings, Levenson points out, is that they’re fleeting and contingent. The love we are talking about here, on the other hand, is characterised by commitment. It is a way of doing things.

To love your students may or may not mean that you feel love for them, but it could mean that you intentionally and voluntarily entertain affection for them, derive enjoyment from them and are devoted to them.

To conceive of any form of love as just being about feelings is to misunderstand it. We might be tempted, for example, to think that the opposite of love is hate, but, as writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has pointed out: “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.”

Crucially, the institutions established to temper love within society do not expect us to give without limits. In Judaism, for example, everyone must take a day off for rest. Even the responsibility of choosing to take a break is taken away, because that, too, is commanded.

In the same vein, if teachers find that they are in a situation of being expected to work in their holidays, out of a sense of duty - of “love” for their school or their students - then I’d argue that this is going beyond the boundaries that have been set for pedagogical love.

Paying attention: the act of love

Given all these constraints, how might love manifest in the classroom?

Philosopher Simone Weil argued that the purpose of school is to cultivate the ability to “pay attention”, and this, I think, is what is really at the heart of how we should understand pedagogical love.

By “paying attention”, Weil doesn’t mean the superficial performances we often demand from students: sitting up, nodding, tracking the teacher and so on. Instead, she is talking about attention as conceptualised by .

Attention, according to White, is something we can be held accountable for. We can decide, promise, resolve or refuse to pay attention; it is therefore something we can be blamed for not doing.

Attention often isn’t about doing things so much as not doing things: not being distracted by other activities or goals.

Attention is also a purposeful, but not a “searching”, concept. Paying attention means listening to, but not listening for. While paying attention to a student, for example, we might notice - but should not be actively listening for - things that prove our suspicions or confirm our prejudices. This, of course, is crucial to our 51���� responsibility to be “professionally curious”.

‘It isn’t so much about liking every student as it is about the skill of paying attention’

Finally, attention isn’t a specified set of tasks, but an act that looks different in different contexts. Paying attention to my teaching involves a different pattern of behaviour than paying attention to my driving. As such, prescriptions to teach in specific ways or arbitrary targets around teaching are obstacles to giving classroom practice our full attention.

So, do teachers need to love their students? I think the answer is “yes” - but that this isn’t the burden we might think it is. That’s because pedagogical love isn’t so much about liking every student as it is about the skill of paying attention.

We are typically hardwired to “love” each other, to attend to each other. The physiological groundwork for love and concern for others is already there during . We are naturally averse to , and have a and for faces.

But love can also operate within constraints.

Yes, it’s true, the student I described at the beginning of this article did irritate me. I always struggled to get on with him. But I tried hard with him nonetheless, put the time in, tried to control my feelings and paid attention.

We have a tendency to overthink love. Love is not always acts of kindness, being selfless or being overwhelmed with emotion. Often love is just about showing up for our students - and being there when they show up for us, in return.

Bernard Andrews is a secondary school philosophy teacher

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