Vol 70, No. 5 — Sept./Oct. 1989 —
The Importance
of Teaching
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We are all in favour of education,
but we tend to take for granted the people who provide it.
If our society cares about the future, it will resume giving
teachers the support and credit they deserve...
Teaching is one of those things, like editing a newspaper
or managing a baseball team, that everybody thinks he or she
can do better than the experts. Everybody has taught something
to somebody at one time or another, after all. We begin our
amateur teaching careers as children by imposing our superior
knowledge on our younger siblings and playmates. As students,
we pass judgment among our peers on this or that teacher's
capabilities. As adults, those of us who do not teach professionally
stand ever ready to criticize those who do.
An educator himself, Bergen Evans once struck back at people
who presume that any fool could be a teacher. Commenting on
George Bernard Shaw's aphorism, "He who can does. He who cannot
teaches," Evans wrote: "The common inference from this much-quoted
statement, that the teacher is a sort of failure in the world
of action, greatly comforts anti-intellectuals. But almost
to a man successful men of action (all of whom think they
could be teachers if they turned aside to it) have proved
failures as teachers." He did not document his information,
but it rings true.
In any case, Shaw's quip does not stand up to logic. Teachers
can do something, and do do something; they
teach. Like any other professional activity, teaching requires
a cultivated ability. To be done exceptionally well, it also
requires a special talent and a sense of vocation. There are
"born teachers" just as there are "born statesmen" or "born
musicians."
Practised diligently by men and women of talent, teaching
is as much of an art as Shaw's metier of play-writing. The
trouble from the teacher's point of view is that there are
a lot more teachers than playwrights or men of action like
generals or financiers. Education is one of our nation's biggest
industries. Because of the sheer number of those who teach
in schools, colleges and universities, they have become part
of the landscape. Like the familiar features of a landscape,
they tend to be overlooked.
Still, there are probably many more great teachers labouring
among the crowd than there are great authors or actors basking
in the spotlight. They could be found anywhere in the educational
system from a graduate to a country school. Teaching, as measured
by its results, does not lend itself to a division between
the big and the bush leagues. Those results come in the form
of the quality of the people it shapes.
Unlike sports, politics, entertainment, the arts or the
law, teaching does not give rise to "stars." Nobody ever got
a Nobel Prize for teaching achievements. True, many academics
have come in for high honours, but always for something other
than their work in the classroom - a book, an economic treatise,
a ground-breaking scientific experiment.
School teachers, as opposed to university professors, are
particularly under-recognized. Who is to say that a woman
conducting a kindergarten class may not be contributing as
much to society than the most degree-laden university president?
Given the evidence that our very first brush with education
leaves a permanent stamp on our characters, that teacher could
be molding a future Abraham Lincoln or a Madame Curie. More
likely, though, she is molding a whole class of the type of
responsible citizens upon whom the wellbeing of our society
depends.
Teaching is a creative act, never more so than in primary
and secondary schools. Good teachers, like good artists, have
their own individual styles of performing. They also respect
the individuality of their students in the realization that
everybody learns through his or her own perceptions. The story
is told of a legendary teacher who was asked at the start
of the term what his course matter would be. "I don't know,"
he said. "I haven't seen my students yet."
It would be a wonderful world if every teacher deeply understood
each and every child and put that understanding into effect,
but that would be asking too much of human nature. Teachers
can become tired and impatient, and give up on troublesome
or backward children . They have their personal prejudices,
and it is sometimes a struggle with their own personalities
to give every pupil the attention he or she requires.
The world would be equally wonderful if every youngster
came to school to learn. There is an element of truth, however,
to the old teachers' room joke that for every one who wants
to teach, there are 20 not wanting to be taught. The teacher
has the peculiar dual task of inculcating knowledge while
at the same time breaking down resistance to its inculcation.
It is part of the challenge of teaching to bring promising
students around to the point where they are willing and even
eager to learn.
'The mediocre teacher tells ... The
great
teacher inspires'
Because instruction is an interpersonal affair, different
teaching styles work on different students. An abrasive performer
might drive his more timid students into their shells. But
then there was Rudyard Kipling, who, In his autobiography
Something of Myself , recalled his English and classics
master. "He had a violent temper , no disadvantage in handling
boys used to direct speech, and a gift of schoolmaster's sarcasm
which must have been a relief to him and was certainly a treasure
trove to me ... Under him I came to feel that words could
be used as weapons, for he did me the honour to talk to me
plentifully ... One learns more from a good scholar in a rage
than from a score of lucid and laborious drudges."
Kipling's phrase, "a good scholar in a rage," should remind
us of the point, often forgotten by those who belittle teachers,
that the best of them have a broad and deep range of knowledge.
First-class teachers seek to ignite in their students an enthusiasm
for their subjects by example and leadership. They are more
than instructors; they are role models for students. "The
mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior
teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires," William
Arthur Ward wrote.
Just what makes a first-class teacher has always been a
matter of debate between educational liberals and conservatives.
Even the traditional method of teaching by terror - spare
not the rod and spoil not the child - has its supporters among
parents who feel that permissiveness in the schools has gone
too far. On the other hand, there seems to be general agreement
that the traditional technique of making students learn by
rote produces not rounded human beings but programmed automatons.
An anonymous principal once warned his staff: "Don't think
that the mind is a warehouse, and that you are here to stuff
it full of goods."
On the other hand, a certain amount of didactic learning
is necessary to show the student the way. "Some flabby persons
try to make education painless," one-time teacher W. E. McNeill
wrote. "Do not,' they say, 'ask students to learn facts, but
teach them to think.' O thinking - what intellectual crimes
are committed in thy name! How can a man think if he doesn't
know?"
Instilling a zest for learning is instilling
a zest for life
At the same time no one would dispute that the aim of education
should be to produce individuals able to think for themselves
and not merely follow what someone else has told them. And
the way for teachers to accomplish this is to concentrate
on what M.F. Ashley Montagu called "the drawing out, not the
pumping in." Teaching should excite a youngster's natural
curiosity. Instead of giving pat answers, it should raise
questions. It was a wise mother who asked her young son after
school not "what did you learn today?" but "what questions
did you ask today?"
It has been said a thousand times in different ways that
education should not stop at school; that the proper role
of the school is to prepare the mind for life-long learning.
The theory is that you do not get an education in a classroom;
you learn how to get an education, which in the long
run you can only acquire by yourself. In fact, the word "educate"
comes from the Latin educere , which means "leading
out" the student into a wider world of knowledge. It is by
stimulating a zest for learning in general that teachers can
perform their greatest service to those in their care, for
a zest for learning is a zest for life. And a zest for life
is what allows people to live contentedly for all of their
days.
As in writing, teaching is at its most efficacious when
it shows instead of tells. The best teachers make their points
by way of illustration. Better still, they demonstrate wherever
possible. Any teacher would do well to keep in mind the Chinese
saying: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and
I understand."
"The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to
the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since,
not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths,
it leads to the stock from which they grew," wrote Edmund
Burke, who possessed one of the best-conditioned minds in
history. By investigating ideas, the teacher becomes a participant
in the act of learning. "To be a teacher in the right sense
is to be a learner," Kierkegaard wrote.
Given what is now known about the psychology of learning,
everyone ideally would be taught in a small group with the
teacher acting as a participant, leading the students in the
pursuit of ideas and motivating them to think about life in
all its aspects. Instruction would be tailored to the learner's
personality, and tightly focussed on individual weaknesses
and strengths.
The teacher is expected to serve as
a surrogate parent
In a world that is far from ideal, that is not the reality.
"In education, we have long given lip service to the fact
that all human beings are different," said Earl C. Kelley,
professor of education at Wayne University. "But we have proceeded
as if this were not so."
The exigencies of economics lead to uniformity. Even in
prosperous jurisdictions, education is strapped for funds.
At its worst, inadequate funding makes for over-crowded classrooms,
and education becomes a kind of mass production process, complete
with a fair percentage of rejects. Teachers being human, there
is always a temptation to treat students as so much raw material
to be fed through a diploma-producing factory. The temptation
is compounded by the fact that the educational system can
be satisfied by filling "production norms."
This helps to explain why, for instance, it is possible
for some young people to graduate from high school unable
to read and write adequately. When such things happen, the
cry goes up: "Where were their teachers, for heaven's sake?"
But to blame teachers for the failings of modern public education
is a classic case of shooting the messenger. Teachers did
not invent the system, nor do they run it. It is the product
of politics, and it is administered by educational bureaucrats
whom teachers often regard as their sworn enemies.
If the public, through its elected and appointed delegates,
opts for a levelling process in which no student is allowed
to fail, or curricula so soft that youths can loaf through
their school days, it is not the fault of the teaching profession.
If parents are careless enough or dumb enough not to notice
that big Johnny can't read, they are hardly entitled to protest.
"If a doctor, lawyer or dentist had 40 people in his office
at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of
whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and
the doctor, lawyer or dentist, without assistance, had to
treat them all with professional excellence for nine months,
then he might have some conception of a classroom teacher's
job," wrote Donald D. Quinn, himself an experienced teacher.
Faced with this daunting situation, some teachers tire of
catering to individual needs and striving for professional
excellence.
"A teacher is like a candle which lights others in consuming
itself ," wrote Giovani Ruffini in an early description of
teacher burn-out . In inner city schools such as the one referred
to in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities , where student behaviour ranges
from "co-operative to life-threatening," burn-out must be
a terrible professional hazard.
You do not have to look as far as the slums of New York
to see where social trends have added to the already-heavy
burden borne by teachers. Broken homes, teen-age promiscuity
and drug and alcohol abuse are common in nice middle-class
neighbourhoods too. Parents are often too apathetic or busy
to meet their parental responsibilities. Problems of youth
that were once dealt with at home have been dumped into the
schools.
In a materialistic society, young people have their attitudes
shaped by a commercial pre-packaged youth culture which encourages
precocity and contrariety towards authority. Materialism also
permeates parental attitudes. In his recent admirable book
The Closing of the American Mind , Allan Bloom wrote:
"Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration
they might have for their children is for them to be wise
- as priests, prophets and philosophers are wise. Specialized
competence and success are all they can imagine." In this
spiritual vacuum, it is often left to teachers to instil whatever
higher values a youth might have.
Society has always expected an awful lot from its teachers,
and now we are expecting even more from them. We expect them
to serve to a large degree as surrogate parents, dealing with
the emotional tangles and torments of the adolescent years.
Teaching is one of those rare jobs in which one's work is
wrapped up in one's personality. It is very demanding psychologically.
The abdication of responsibility within so many homes has
added to the psychological drain.
Yet at the same time as the complications and vexations
of teaching life multiply, the public persists in under-valuing
the teacher. Every thinking person would agree that the hope
of the human race lies chiefly in education, but most of us
pay little attention to the people who provide this precious
service, nor do we give them much support in the vital job
they do.
Fidel Castro had his priorities straight when he declared:
"We need teachers - a heroine in every classroom." Teaching
is not usually associated with heroics, even though it takes
actual physical courage to face up to the lurking threat of
violence in some North American high schools today. The only
teacher-hero in recent popular literature who readily comes
to mind appears in Thomas Flanagan's novel The Year of
the French , in which the protagonist risks imprisonment
to instruct poor Irish children in illicit schools proscribed
by the English in the interests of keeping the Irish in subjugation.
He and his enemies appreciated just how important education
can be when freedom is at stake.
A tradition that has been lost and
should be found
More commonly, however, the heroism is not so dramatic.
"If I had a child who wanted to be a teacher, I would bid
him Godspeed as if he were going to war," wrote James Hilton,
author of the great novel of teaching, Goodbye Mr. Chips.
"For indeed the war against prejudice, greed and ignorance
is eternal, and those who dedicate themselves to it give their
lives no less because they may live to see some fraction of
the battle won."
Not every teacher is a hero or heroine, of course. There
are good, bad and indifferent ones, ranging from those who
totally devote their lives to their students to those who
totally devote their lives to themselves. Our social priorities
do not make it easy to encourage the best and the brightest
to teach. Surveys of students who consistently get top marks
in university show that they intend to go into more prestigious
and more lucrative professions. To a large extent, teachers
themselves tend to be diffident about their occupation. "I
beg of you," said William G. Carr to a representative teacher,
"to stop apologizing for being a member of the most important
... profession in the world."
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a
lost tradition," Jacques Barzun wrote. If this society knows
what is good for it, that regard will be restored. Parents
and other concerned citizens will do all they can to make
a teacher's life less troublesome and give due credit to the
profession. To a large extent, teachers are in charge of the
future. The fate of people in the future depends on how well
they are taught today.
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