THINKING ABOUT TEACHING

By Gabriel Moran

The nature of teaching does not seem to have been a prominent question in the history of philosophy. Perhaps philosophers have shied away from the question because, while it is easy to undermine the naive notion that teaching is the transmitting of knowledge, it is not so easy to describe an alternative understanding of teaching. Socrates is the first key figure in western thought to engage the problem of teaching; it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that he was also the last. Alfred North Whitehead’s famous statement that all western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato might be specified and reformulated as the principle that all western philosophy of teaching consists of reactions to Socrates.

The reactions to Socrates concerning teaching are twofold: 1) Some people think that the nature of teaching was solved by Socrates and his method of “Socratic dialogue.” Instead of telling students the truth, the teacher teaches by drawing out the truth through clever techniques of questioning. 2) Some people think that Socrates proved that no one can teach anyone anything. In their view, people who are called teachers do not really teach at all. They merely provide occasions of learning, they try to motivate students and they should get out of the students’ way.

The first reaction, Socratic dialogue, refers to a helpful method, especially in the classroom. Any competent classroom instructor asks questions, tries to get students to reflect on what they already know, engages in conversation. But the mystery at the heart of teaching is not comprehended by these moves. Here the metaphor for teaching shifts from pushing in knowledge to pulling it out, but a naive notion of knowledge may still remain untouched by this change in classroom strategy.

The second reaction - no one can teach anyone anything - obliquely contains a shocking truth. That is, no matter how good is the intention and how sound is the execution, no necessary connection exists between the individual teacher’s intention to teach and anyone’s learning what the teacher intends to be taught. Every experienced classroom instructor knows this truth, although he or she may not be inclined to dwell on it. If one does reflect on the gap between the teacher’s intention and the pupils’ learning, it can lead to cynicism about what one is being paid for or it can lead to a search for a new vocation. For avoiding both of these conclusions, the schoolteacher needs a context in which to accept the limitations that are inherent to schoolteaching.

The belief that no one can teach anyone anything profoundly affects society’s view of schools for young people and the work of schoolteaching. Schools are seen as holding stations for a society that does not have a place for children and young adults. The belief that no one can teach anyone anything must be hidden from the pupils in the schools. That hiding can be fairly easily done in elementary school, once the first grader is socialized into the ritual of school. But society’s pretense begins to slip in high school, a fact which is not unrelated to the ennui and violence that regularly surface in high schools. In college, much of the pretense of teaching is simply dropped. The college student puts up with the peculiar ritual of lecturing while waiting to get the credits to qualify for a place in the outside world. A contrast between school and ‘the real world “ is casually made by students and by people outside the school. Even college professors often use this language, although nothing could be more insulting to their profession.

This description of the contemporary school system is what leads would be radicals to call for the abolition of school. In addition to the fact that “de-schooling” will never happen, the protest is itself based on an unrealistic attitude to teaching and learning. The radical reformer often paints an idyllic picture of how young people would learn with enthusiasm and joy if they were not subjected to teachers and a disciplined environment. But much of human learning takes hard work and all of learning takes teaching. What is needed is to specify carefully what a school can do - and more specifically what classroom teaching can and cannot do.

Starting with classroom instruction is the wrong place. As the basis of reform we need a more comprehensive theory and practice of teaching-learning. Philosophers from Plato to the present have failed us; even John Dewey, who has brilliant asides on the act of teaching, has no overall philosophy of teaching. Philosophers have usually begun with the problem of a man explaining things to boys; this tradition continues today when college professors write most of the books and essays on teaching.

The most fruitful place to start reflecting on teaching is not with a man explaining things to a boy but with a mother caring for an infant. A mother begins teaching by showing the child how to do something. The initial act of teaching is a physical activity in which there may be few if any words. When words do appear in teaching they are first used as direct commands rather than as rational explanations. To teach is to show someone how to do something. Learning means responding to being shown how to do something. Teaching and learning is a single activity seen from opposite ends.

There are several forms of teaching-learning that nearly everyone encounters in the modern world. They include the teaching-learning in the family setting, on the work site and in leisure activities. Each of these forms has a variety of teaching languages associated with it. There are three “families of teaching languages. “ Languages such as storytelling, lecturing and preaching constitute a rhetorical family; this use of language points to a definite end to be achieved. Languages such as praise and condemn, confess and forgive, comfort and mourn are therapeutic languages; their aim is not to move the will to an end but to restore the power of willing. The third family, conversation, includes role playing, dialectical discussion and academic criticism. It draws its content from the other two families, playing with the meaning of the words. Academic criticism is the specific language of the classroom. As the last language of the last family, it can be the richest or the emptiest form of teaching.

Modern schools are complex institutions that may include all the forms of teaching and use many different languages of teaching. For the activity of teaching, the school is not a parallel institution to family, work and leisure; it overlaps these three. The school may teach a student attitudes and practices similar to what are learned in the family. School is also a preparation for the work world as well as a kind of work on its own. Leisure activities are an integral part of most elementary and secondary schools and associated with colleges. Thus, there is not schoolteaching plus other kinds of teaching. Instead, school has several forms of teaching but the form of teaching that the school most specifically offers is classroom instruction. The classroom should have a limited but clearly focused form of teaching-learning and mainly use the language of academic criticism.

Teaching in a classroom is not the whole of teaching nor even the main case of teaching. Academic instruction is a very peculiar form of teaching that requires a stringent set of conditions, particularly the student’s readiness to play with language. The teacher’s task in this strange setting is to clarify what students have already learned from reading books, using the Internet and engaging in other experiences outside the classroom. That is why fifty-year-olds who go back to school, usually with some trepidation, inevitably do well, while a great many fifteen-year-olds are bored out of their minds or are rebellious in the classroom.

The answer to this problem is not to cast fifteen-year-olds out on their own, based on the dubious premise that they are more mature than adolescents used to be. They need teaching, as does every human being. That teaching includes classroom instruction but much less of it than is currently demanded of them and only in conjunction with other kinds of teaching-learning. Until the late nineteenth century, most human beings were educated in the home and on the work site; a lucky minority also learned their letters in a classroom. The movement that attempted to extend literacy to everyone was admirable except that the school swallowed the language of teaching and learning. In history books of the future, the century of 1860-1960 will be seen as an aberration in the history of education, a period when education was equated with children in schools and when teaching was equated with classroom instruction.

Since the 1960s the whole established system has been in dangerous disarray. Some reform measures are worthwhile but are weighed down by our inadequate language of teaching-learning. For example, lengthening the school day could be useful if the school is seen as a coordinator of complementary forms of teaching-learning: artistic and athletic performance, job training, volunteer service work and classrooms. But simply adding more classroom time could worsen things. Very few people can make good use of classroom learning for more than two or three hours a day and more than three or four times a week. That is not to disparage the classroom; the teaching-learning of the classroom can be an invaluable asset; but excessive exposure to it is deadening.

One of the main reforms needed, therefore, is to develop apprenticeship programs for high school and college students, instead of our century-old system of having classrooms for academically gifted students and job training for everyone judged to be not so gifted. But no serious change will happen until we change the language of teacher and teaching. The school people who currently exercise a presumed ownership of those terms have to be willing to let go of them. Most of these schoolteachers are working long hours with great dedication. They are understandably resistant to relinquishing what is in their possession. But giving up the exclusive claim to “teach” and “teacher” would improve their work and remove some of the burden unfairly placed upon schoolteachers.

There is no such things as the “teaching profession”; every profession worthy of the name teaches. There is, however, a profession of academic instruction that requires skill, preparation and hard work. The people who do this work deserve more economic support and higher status than our society now provides. Classroom teaching is indispensable for students of all ages to help make sense of the rest of their education where most teaching occurs.