However, the teacher's role is to give as much
help as possible. It may be true that the vision
corresponds exactly to the personality type but
it is no good noting this and doing nothing.
These are difficult questions and you will notice
that I am carefully not attempting to offer
definitive answers. My main concern is that
vision teachers, in taking a holistic and
humanistic stance, may neglect the value and the
validity of things that are measurable. A person
- centred approach allows us to have flexible
priorities, but the behaviour of light is no more
negotiable than that of gravity so, while we can
take a long term view and include views of the
symptomatic significance of the visual
difficulty, in the end, the improvement or lack
of it, in the vision, is what counts.
It all comes back to finding the balance between
trying and not trying, doing and not doing, being
energetic and being passive and I think the point
is that here we are coming very close to engaging
with the nature of life itself; which is no doubt
why everybody finds it so difficult, daunting and
downright uncomfortable. Because, surely, perfection
exists only as an idea and anybody who
seriously expects to find it in the real world is
suffering from a delusion and if they try to find
it will only find unhappiness or inflict it on
others.
At the same time, the idea is crucially
important in giving direction to our efforts
towards doing/being better, just as the
stars, being out of reach, help us to steer
courses to terrestrial destinations.
In practice, then, we should always aim as near
perfection as possible - towards the absolute
normalisation of vision by normalising function
and helping to remove whatever obstacles we and
our pupils find.
But in our way of going about this task there
should be no obsessive perfectionism, just the
infinite flexibility, patience and
resourcefulness to keep us and our clients moving
forward one step at a time with our eyes fixed
. . . resting easily on that distant star. In
that way, in time, we may even become perfect teachers.
Feedback
on the questions raised in this article will be
especially welcome.
PM
