Teaching Without Credentials

We think teaching without credentials is a societal taboo that deserves to be looked at from a different perspective. The different perspective being that it could be a crucial tool for our collective healing.

This page is unfinished and will be for a while. It serves as a handle to talk about this challenging topic with others.

Definitions

Credentials: Any form of education or training that is usually awarded with some kind of certificate or diploma.

Teaching with credentials:

• Makes people feel safe knowing they are receiving legitimate trainings.
• Ensures a teacher has dedicated enough time to be able to teach.

• Ensures a teacher does not make obvious beginners’ mistakes in their teaching.

• Requires significant financial investment. This exerts high pressure on the teacher to make their teachings only available commercially.
• Creates an expectation of professionalism when the teacher is teaching. This makes it challenging for the teacher to be vulnerable. Wewould personally say that it is impossible for the teacher to be truly authentic in this way.

Teaching without credentials

• Does not require financial investment. This means that it is easier for the teacher to make their teachings available for less or no money.

• Makes it easier to be authentic when you are teaching something you believe in personally.

• Means there is no integrity check. Teachers could be teaching in a wrong or even hurtful manner.
• Means that the likelihood of obvious mistakes is bigger.

No experience?

• Can someone with 3000 hours of meditation experience teach people how to meditate?
• Can someone who is really good a feeling their body and verbalizing it teach people how to do yoga?

• Can someone who has a lot of empathy and psychological knowledge give therapy sessions?

• How integer are we, are you? But also, how integer is the professional? Or even the guru who spent their entire life meditating? What does any kind of diploma even mean when you could be listening to the person teaching in presence and receive their teaching for purely what is is worth in that moment?

The taboo

We think that teaching without credentials is looked down upon in our society when it can be equally, if not more legitimate than teaching with a certificate. It really depends on who, and what they are teaching. It’s challenging to even talk about this, because of how much we value formal education and how also the commercial side of teaching is ingrained into our thinking. Can we even have a dialogue about a different way of thinking?