Sixties pop group The Beatles sang 'All you need is love,' and then they broke up. It took them years to reconcile their differences. Love is a fragile thing. It requires nurturing with care. More songs, poems, stories and movies have been written about love than any other subject under the sun. It inspires, it overwhelms, it makes us weep, it makes us smile, or dance with joy. We are all subject to it, and we all succumb to its subtle powers at some point in our lives.

In yesterday's post I wrote about the many kinds of love we encounter, and highlighted the problem that we only have one word to describe them all. The Greeks had many words, one of which is Agape, an all encompassing, sacrificial love, borne out of devotion to the object of one's love. This kind of love is apparent in education when teachers go the extra mile and do extraordinary things to support their students and encourage them to achieve their potentials. It's the kind of love that prompts us to go on marathon runs to raise money for those less fortunate than ourselves. It's what prompts people to throw themselves unthinkingly into a rough sea to save a stranger from drowning. The deep relationship that can be forged between teachers and their students can lead to extraordinary results, and numerous authors have written about this.

Other kinds of love are equally important, not only in education, but in all facets of life. There is a form of love expressed in the Greek word Phileo which means brotherly love, friendship that does not involve any form of romantic involvement. It's where the word philanthropy comes from, to which the word Anglophile (love of English) owes its origins, and was also the inspiration for the name Philadelphia - the US 'city of brotherly love'. Phileo is a love that describes feelings of belonging, and a sense of common purpose. It's the same sense of belonging that Abraham Maslow described in his hierarchy of human needs. It's something we all crave, and is often experienced in social groupings, friendship circles and clubs, where children (and adults) share a common purpose and goals. It's also why many of us join social networks and use social media - we want to connect to others who have similar interests and backgrounds. We want to share. We want to belong.

Phileo is related to another Greek word, Koinonia, which is translated as sharing, participating together, and ultimately enjoying being together with others. Phileo is often needed when children are required to work together, and it's often the case that the groups who enjoy being together perform better. It's about fellowship - going through the same experiences and meeting challenges together. Collaborative learning is on the rise in modern pedagogy, because teachers have discovered that children tend to learn more when they discuss, compare and contrast their ideas. The essence of good collaborative learning is when students work together to achieve a common goal, and draw on each other's strengths and abilities to reach that end. Phileo love is the vital ingredient in this process, because it binds the group members together, and the outcome is mutual respect and support. In such rich learning contexts, love really is all you need.

Photo by Ibrahim Ludaj on Wikimedia Commons


All you need is love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.