If there is any one indispensable insight with which a young married couple should begin their life together, it is that they should try to keep open, at all cost, the lines of communication between them. Everyone needs and should have premarital counseling, if only to help them to this all important insight. Here is a place where the church’s ministry needs to be strengthened, since so many people turn to the church to have their marriages solemnized. Before each marriage is performed, the minister should meet with the couple and help them prepare for the relationship, and he should include in that preparation the guidance that will help them to understand how indispensably important to its preservation, and, therefore, to their life together, are all the means of communication between them. Fortunately, more and more ministers are assuming this responsibility; and fortunately, also, more and more seminaries are providing instructions that teach ministers how to minister helpfully at this strategically important time. But much more needs to be done. Many marital breakdowns due to failure of communication could be alleviated, if not prevented, by giving young couples assistance when they are beginning their life together.
But communication is indispensable in all relationships, and not only in the personal ones like marriage. In labor disputes, for instance, the bargaining relationship breaks down when either one or both parties abandon the attempt to communicate with the other. Therefore, we may conclude, in paraphrase of the Scriptures: If any man says that he loves God and will not try to communicate with his brother, he is a liar!
But what is communication, and why is it so difficult to achieve? Most people seem to think of communication as getting a message across to another person. “You tell him what you want101 him to know.” This concept produces a one-way verbal flow for which the term “monologue” is descriptive. Much of the church’s so-called communication is monological, with preachers and teachers telling their hearers, both adults and children, the message they think they should know. The difficulty with monological activity is that it renders the hearer passive. It assumes that he is a receptacle into which the desired message may be poured. It eliminates the possibility of his active participation in the formulation of the message, and seems not to heed that a part of the message is in the person who is to receive it.
Those who have studied the dynamics of communication and the process by which it occurs are convinced that the monological principle is contradictory to the nature of communication, and as a method is the least effective. Reflective observation of our own learning indicates that communication is most effective when we become a part of the process and meet the message with our own content. Furthermore, the monological principle is not one that was used by our Lord. He, Who was the full incarnation of love, made people participants in the Good News that He proclaimed. We think, for example, of His conversation with the woman at the well, in the course of which she moved from her superficial understanding of water to His understanding of the water of life, wherein the meaning of her life was revealed to her.[21] Again, we think of the lawyer who put Him to a test by asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, and our Lord drew him out in such a way that he answered his own question.[22] The Gospels are full of such illustrations of our Lord’s method of communication. It is curious, therefore, that the church has settled for the opposite monological principle which is quite unequal to the task of conveying the full meanings of the gospel.
Communication Is Dialogue
Our Lord’s method, which we may call the dialogical, has been vindicated by modern research into the dynamics of communication,102 which has demonstrated conclusively that the to-and-fro process between teacher and pupil, between parent and child, provides the most dependable and permanent kind of education. What is that to-and-fro between one who knows and one who does not? The monological argument against the dialogical process is that the ignorant and untutored have nothing to contribute, so that the addition of zero and zero equals zero. This kind of comment, which is made by surprisingly intelligent and otherwise perceptive people, and all too often by educators, demonstrates how little they know about the processes of learning. Nor does it follow that the dialogical principle forbids the use of the monological method. There is a place for the lecture and for direct presentation of content, but to be most useful they should be in a dialogical context. Furthermore, it is quite possible for a person giving a lecture to give it in such a way that he draws his hearers into active response to his thought, and although they remain verbally silent, the effect is that of dialogue. As a matter of fact, one should not confuse the different methods of teaching with the dialogical concept of communication. Both the lecturer and the discussion leader can be either monological or dialogical, even though they are using different methods. The person who believes that communication, and therefore education, is dialogical in nature, will use every tool in the accomplishment of his purpose. When the question needs to be raised, he may use the discussion method or perhaps some visual aid. When an answer is indicated, he may give a lecture or use some other transmissive resource. But his orientation to his task is based on his belief that his accomplishments as a leader are dependent partly upon what his pupil brings to learning, and that for education to take place their relationship must be mutual.
What is it that the learner brings that is of such great value to the teacher? What possibly can the child have that the parent needs in order to help the child learn and mature? The child, and every person for that matter, brings to every encounter meanings drawn from his previous experience which, in one way or103 another, prepares him for what is to be learned. In [Chapter IV] we considered some of the early, basic acquisitions of the individual; for example, the meanings of trust and mistrust acquired in his first year, of liberating autonomy or resentful dependence, and other meanings which influence to a high degree his openness to the teacher and to what the teacher has to give. In addition to these basic meanings, he has a whole host of others which he has picked up from his previous experience: knowledge of people, of himself, of the world in which he lives, of the nature of things, all of which he uses in response to the approach of parent, teacher, friend, or whoever may be apt to confront him with new truth.
We need to remember that the meanings the learner brings are far from complete and mature, and that he is in the process of growing and becoming more adequate. He wants to learn, but he does not want to learn at the price of his own integrity. In learning he wants to have the sense of acquiring new powers. Any approach to him that seems to diminish him in any way closes him as a responsive, learning person. Furthermore, his experience thus far and its meaning produce in him questions for which he would like to have answers. The individual, therefore, brings to his meeting with others certain beliefs, attitudes, understandings, knowledge, and questions, which, in one way or another, have prepared him or closed him to learning. A good teacher, accordingly, pays attention to what his pupil brings.
The teacher (and here I am not thinking of the professional teacher only) first makes it his business to find out about his pupil or about the person with whom he wishes to communicate. As teacher, he needs to know as much about his pupil as he needs to know about his subject. He wants to help him ask his questions, so that what is communicated will be an answer to his questions. All too often what we offer as answers fail because they are addressed to questions which have not been asked, and, therefore, do not have meaning for them. The parent and teacher, therefore, should seek to call forth and formulate the understandings104 of children in order that they may more readily hear and understand the new truth that is being presented.
The need to be aware of the meanings that each person brings to his educational encounters is equally relevant to disagreements between adults. Many a husband and wife, for instance, fail to deal with a disagreement or quarrel constructively because each is thinking only in terms of the meanings he brings to the conflict, instead of trying also to discover the concerns and meanings his partner brings. We all know that sometimes the real cause of a quarrel is not expressed, with the result that the quarrelers can only deal with the superficial meanings of the conflict and in ways that further alienate them from each other. The responsibility for communication in such instances calls for each partner to pay attention to the meanings that the other one brings to the conflict, and try also to help the other say what he means, for his own and the sake of the other. In this way, constructive communication may be resumed.