In my high school years, two books stood out as testaments of the teaching profession, Jacques Barzun’s Teacher in America (1945) and Gilbert Highet’s The Art of Teaching (1950). Both were European-born intellectuals who told the academic world and those aspiring to it what education was about.
I quickly realized they were very different books. Barzun spoke from Olympus, simultaneously shocking and pontificating. (He began the book: “Education is indeed the dullest of subjects, and I intend to say as little about it as I can.”) His views were elevated to the point of altitude sickness. In the 1980 edition of Teacher, he lamented that “the once proud and efficient public school system of the United States … has turned into wasteland where violence and vice share the time with ignorance and idleness.” As for higher education, he sought to preserve it for an intellectual elite while offering adult education to others who “love learning for its bright glow while being unwilling or unable to stand its heat.”
Highet seemed more down to earth, beginning, “It is difficult to write a book on the art of teaching, because the subject is constantly changing.” He offered much practical advice: To be a good teacher you must know and like your subject, like your students (“If you do not actually like boys and girls, or young men and young women, give up teaching”), and know young people. To that point, the book seems as true today as then, if a bit elementary.
But then Highet espoused ideas as lofty as Barzun’s and as dated as phrenology. Want to be a good teacher? Follow four models: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus. But he also endorsed theories derived from eugenics, or maybe the four humors. Divide your students by body types, because “everyone can be classified by” … whether they belong among “the fat and physically lazy … governed by their stomach and bowels,” the muscular “young men, with broad shoulders, lean hips ... loud voices and aggressive gestures,” and the “thin, clever, highly sensitive, ruled by their brains and nervous systems.”
Both shared a blindly unexamined male chauvinism. Barzun’s chapter “The Human Boy” was followed by “Adults, Workers, and Marriageable Women,” saying the latter “are probably handicapped by four years of leisure and learning for the battle of life over crib and stove.” Highet extoled great universities and schools—Eton, Winchester, Boston Latin, West Point, Sandhurst—and asks “How does this tradition … create outstanding men from ordinary boys?” He mentions only three actual women: Queen Elizabeth, the novelist Angela Thirkell, and a “plump, elderly, and charming” French teacher he had.
But let me share some later reading that has stuck with me as those past masters thankfully did not.
Like the best teaching, Philip W. Jackson’s The Practice of Teaching, a collection of seven essays published 30 years ago by Teachers College, begins with inquiry. It opens with 14 questions, and the question mark is Jackson’s favorite punctuation throughout. In each essay, he focuses on the challenges of teaching, and invites the reader/teacher to explore together how they might be met. His truly Socratic method of beginning with ignorance is far more heartening—and effective—than any reassurance. How good to hear, for example, his response to Henry Adams: “A teacher affects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops.” Jackson: “In all likelihood our poor teacher cannot tell for sure where his influence starts!”
He asks often unconsidered questions, and his declarations are themselves often confessions of ignorance: “Does knowledge of all kinds, regardless of how it was acquired, contain within itself directions about how it might be transmitted to someone else? Teaching is more complicated than most people think, including—strange to say—many teachers.” If I had to choose a single book to be my guide into the mysteries of teaching, it might well be Jackson’s.
Understanding the Developing Mind
Whole books have rarely been my source of lasting insight. The single essay, like the great short story, has the power to crystallize a vital concept. One such essay is “The Lost Tools of Learning,” by mystery writer/Dante translator Dorothy L. Sayers. Her argument: The historic Trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—is ideally suited to the developing minds of children through the school grades.Really? Sayers was never a teacher, but she seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of developmental phases, which she alliteratively labeled Poll-Parrot, Pert, and Poet. Poll-Parrot, the youngest, is when “learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable,” so provide rudimentary tools of language and thought here. Pert, on the other hand, is “characterized by contradicting, answering back, [and] liking to ‘catch people out’ (especially one’s elders).” Here’s the time for teaching reasoning and argumentation, showing the young how to use those tools productively. Finally, I don’t think I’ve ever read a better short description of adolescence and its promise than this: “The Poetic age is popularly known as the ‘difficult’ age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others.” I first heard of this essay from a fellow Ph.D. student, and I’ve returned to it many times for an idiosyncratic but persuasive global insight into the heart of teaching.
The second essay, like the first, comes from a writer who was not a teacher per se: E.F. Schumacher, early proponent of European union, and author of the groundbreaking Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. That book, along with insights into supporting developing economies with low-tech solutions, included a chapter titled “Education—the Greatest Resource,” which insisted that “the essence of education is the transmission of values, [which] do not help us pick our way through life unless they have become ... a part of our mental makeup.”
In addition to developing this idea and explaining how reductionist and utilitarian models give no help here, the essay explains the important distinctions between “convergent” and “divergent” questions—such as those whose solution “can be written down and passed on to others, who can apply it without needing to reproduce the mental effort necessary to find it” versus those that “are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites” and “are the real stuff of life.” How to balance freedom and order, mercy and justice, reason and emotion—these are the problems of the “hidden curriculum” that teachers—and students—can only study by living it.
Continuing My Education
The oldest book on the list is the one I found most recently. As interim head of the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart (MD), I learned about Sister Janet Erskine Stuart’s book The Education of Catholic Girls, published in 1911. So I dutifully opened the book, and found a proof of what Ezra Pound once said: “Many dead [writers] are our grandchildren’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have already been gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting receptacle.” Time after time, I found an apt quotation for a school talk and a piece of wisdom I still carry with me. (I have a collection of her best insights nearly 3,000 words long, of which I can offer only a very few here.)One favorite is her take on lifelong learning. “A good teacher is an evergreen learner,” to which she added, in the era of finishing schools, “A ‘finished education’ is an illusion or else a lasting disappointment; the very word implies a condition of mind which is opposed to any further development, a condition of self satisfaction.”
Those who assume Catholic teaching of 100 years ago was merely a form of indoctrination will be startled to read, “We must welcome their independent thought even if it seems aggressive and conceited … The too-submissive minds which give no trouble now, are laying it all up for the future.” In fact Mother Stuart, as she was called, had enormous respect for the young, warning, “If the children could combine the result of their observations and bring out a manual of ‘Teacher Study,’ we should have strange revelations as to how it looks from the other side. We should be astonished at the shrewdness of the small juries that deliberate, and the insight of the judges that pronounce sentence upon us.”
An exact contemporary of John Dewey, more than a decade older than Maria Montessori, she anticipated ideas that now seem to us quintessentially progressive, counseling that “each mind needs to be met just where it is—with its own mental images, vocabulary, habit of thought and attention, all calling for consideration and adaptation of the subject to their particular case,” and that “we are beginning to believe what has never ceased to be said, that lessons in lesson-books are not the whole of education … the highest value of all belongs to the things which children have made entirely themselves … It is of greater value to a child to have grown one perfect flower than to have pulled many to pieces to examine their structure.”
Amen to that.
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