The Turning Around of the Soul A Review of Jeremiah Conway’s The Alchemy of Teaching: The Transformation of Lives (review)

Human life offers few experiences more vital and astonishing than the rare creative relationships that sometimes, with grace and intelligence, blossom between a teacher and his or her students. Ultimately the essential nature of teaching and learning, the mainsprings, so to speak, of what makes the transaction work, may remain mysteries, at least to empirical observation. But like poetry and music, the essence of teaching can still be discussed and understood on its own terms. We do this by taking a leap, as all great teachers and writers about teaching do, into what theologian Paul Tillich calls the “depth dimension” of experience. This dimension concerns the deepest motives that make the teacher’s actions effective in creating an environment where real learning can happen.

Much has been written about teaching techniques and even about the question of what makes a great teacher great. Occasionally an author appears who is able to articulate the inner principles of the kind of teaching that is sufficiently authentic that it changes students’ lives. Parker Palmer is one of those teacher-authors, whose books To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (1993), and The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (1998) make some of these principles beautifully clear and accessible to others. But few books capture the essence of authentic teaching, that is, teaching that has transformative effects on people, as graphically and dramatically as Jeremiah Conway’s new book, The Alchemy of Teaching, subtitled, appropriately, The Transformation of Lives.

The word alchemy, standing prominently in its title, presents the book's central metaphor. A medieval science, devoted to the study of chemical properties of various substances, alchemy for some practitioners became focused on the goal of transmuting base metal (e.g., lead) into precious (gold or silver). But in the hands of spiritual writers and mystics, such as Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) in Germany and others, the alchemical process became an analogy for what happens in the transformation of a person from an ordinary state of being into a spiritual state, including qualities like selflessness and fearlessness. Jerry Conway uses the term in a similar way—as an analogy for what he calls “the dynamics of human change” (7). Conway believes with considerable passion that “philosophical works transform lives” (23–24), and the narratives in the book testify to the ways this can happen. In an age in which education tends to be defined as the transfer of information, The Alchemy of Teaching presents an ancient (and timeless) view of education, as expressed more than twenty-four hundred years ago by one of its most profound and eloquent advocates, Plato (c. 428–348 B.C.E.). For Plato, real education, far from being a mere transfer of information, involves “the turning around of the soul” (27–28). Built into this line from Plato’s Republic are ideas that have led writers down the centuries to draw profound inferences of their own about learning. Among those threading their way through Conway’s narratives is the idea that at the center of each person is a spiritual core, called soul—“the seat of the deepest impulses and energies that drive the personality,” as the author put it to me in private conversation. The problem is that these impulses may have been turned in the wrong direction, by the distractions and degenerative influences in a person’s life. As Conway explained further, the word soul means “what a person is about. It’s the part of us that connects us, through our emotions and thoughts, to the world. It’s the most basic orientation of the personality, affecting one’s imagination, body, and mind, and their connections to others.” In our time the distractions we experience are often the results of hypnotic messages from...