"I'm the Bishop"

by Oliver Gibson

When I taught for UB's Graduate School of Education, I was in Educational Administration, teaching students how to run schools. I felt that my purpose was to awaken minds to something different from what they were doing.

I thought the most mind-awakening thing I did was to teach a course on leadership. Students read such things as the seventh book of Plato's Republic, where he was mulling over what kind of a curriculum he wanted to have for these leaders. We also read Machiavelli's The Prince and Tolstoy's epilogue to War and Peace.

Then, after a time, I taught another book, Jean Genet's The Balcony. The Balcony was a house of prostitution. The men came not for the usual services, but to have a woman help them carry out their fantasy. The first one showed up, and he was a plumber or something like that. He wanted to imagine himself a bishop. He put on his tall miter on and coat and got up on a little dais, and he felt bigger than life.

On a couple of occasions, I was asked, "Whaddya got that dirty book for?" The last year before I retired, I thought maybe I was going to have my first student grievance. A student had a teenage son who saw the book on her coffee table and asked her what she was reading that for. She was a bit upset about that.

But one day, she was getting ready for an interview with a school in a nearby district. She wanted to be an administrator. She was getting herself dressed up for the interview and looked in the mirror, when she said, "My goodness, I'm the bishop." She made the connection.

It was quite a chore for her to see that connection. I guess we tend not to think that we're supposed to make that kind of connection to anything personal. We think we need to know about things like quadratic equations and Roman antiquities. I prefer the long-standing tradition that says that education can be an awakening process.