Ten commandments for teaching
Murchland, Bernard
II NOT SURPHISING THAT IT'S OFTEN BADLY DONE Ten Commandments for teachi BERNARD MURCHLAND i~IS OFTENCHARGED that college teaching is the only rofession for which no training...
...II REFLECTIOHS OH A |ESUIT VJHIVERSITY Twenty-five years later IIIIII RAYMOND A. SCHROTH pERHAPS THE SINGLEmost important thing about our class at Fordham, now that I think of it twenty.five years after we have left, is that the Korean War ended the year before we graduated, and thus we were spared--at least in so far as our military obligation was concerued--a necessary emotional linkage between graduation and death...
...But on the whole we come in the green glory of our youth to our positions with little notion of what to do...
...We adopt almost instinctivelyan adversary posture towards "the administration...
...At a deeper level, pluralism rests upon the Kantian notion that persons ought always be treated as ends and not merely means...
...Unless robust traditions guide us, our reform efforts will be clumsy and unenlightened...
...Recent parts relate to past parts organically...
...II NOT SURPHISING THAT IT'S OFTEN BADLY DONE Ten Commandments for teachi BERNARD MURCHLAND i~IS OFTENCHARGED that college teaching is the only rofession for which no training is necessary...
...However, I do not want to overemphasize the extrinsic aspects of the theatrical metaphor...
...One element of experience is "married" (James again) to previous elements...
...It is not, therefore, surprising that we often do it badly...
...An old Latin adage applies here: nihil novetur nisi traditum est...
...We are not, they believed, in any significant way human until we can talk humanly...
...We begin with a text as an actor begins with a script...
...What is offered as cool, objective, and impersonal knowledge is itself the outcome of value preferences...
...B. -- smashing the mirror behind the bar at the Decatur Bar, coming home running over the roofs and Commonweal: 524...
...Our generation--"the fifties," "the silertt generation"-has not had good press...
...From this perception he draws the conclusion that education is learning how to imitate, as though in a ritual, those models of humanity that it is the liberal arts' chief responsibility to transmit...
...A great defect of college education is a failure to channel the idealism of the young to suitable ends...
...It is the principal means at our disposal for advancing that ideal...
...The relationship · between work and liberal education is an urgent and largely unresolved one...
...After all, they invented the footnote...
...He was particularly good on the French...
...For reasons not entirely different, those who espouse a democratic ideal hold logos in equally high esteem...
...There is an old joke about a world-famous scholar who always panicked at the sight of undergraduate students, fearing that they might get in the way of whatever important work he might be engaged in...
...But there is a subtler kind of plagiarism that goes on all the time...
...Support the institution...
...without tradition...
...We must, therefore, like any actor rehearse and hone the talents necessary to our craft, One of the best philosophy teachers I ever had acted out each new thinker we took up in class, thus dramatizing their ideas...
...And almost every college has at least one administrator, on a bounteous travel allowance, who specializes in the newest thing...
...That is to say, we learn how to become human by engaging in a sustained series of rehearsals...
...Community is a word for our shared experience...
...It surely counts for something...
...It is an inevitable factor, mandating that we clarify the moral premises and implications of what we teach...
...Our social and intellectual heritage has been built up gradually over the ages...
...Ideas are isomorphic...
...We must make a distinction, and indeed a radical distinction, between colleges and graduate-professional schools...
...Let them do so and be evaluated accordingly...
...If a liberal arts college is not a community of all its constituencies, it'soon degenerates into a Hobbesian jungle of class conflict--students against faculty, faculty against administration, minorities against everybody--a kind of perpetual war of all pitted against one another in a tangle of immediate self-interest...
...They tend to be generous in acknowledging sources...
...Or in any other very important sense that I can think of...
...Community, the third value I wish to note here, is a natural outcome of dialogu,e...
...And most of us do so out of conviction, taking pride and satisfaction in the knowledge that we are doing an important and civilizing work...
...Not that we were then free to chase our careers...
...As a result there is a lot of craziness in higher education, creating a climate in which it is often difficult to distinguish desirable innovation from mere faddism...
...A somewhat pitiful commentary on the profession...
...often bullied by administrators and trustees...
...True, they do not outrightiy rebel as they did in the sixties, although they might again...
...It is good advice to be suspicious of reform movements...
...Education in this sense is the difficult art of making meaningful connections with the experiences of the race...
...One of the worst of these is the deeply ingrained belief that publishing has some necessary bearing on what we do...
...Victims of enfeebled initiation rites, the young in our society are not given adequate outlets for their emotions nor able to dream the large dreams appropriate to their age...
...Intellectual work attracts solitary types...
...By cultural ideal I mean something like what the Greeks meant by paideia and in our day that is a democratic ideal...
...I put it forth as an axiom that very little of lasting significance can be taught in college from a disciplinary perspective alone...
...It favors an empirical temperament and endorses fallibilism...
...A premium is put on new knowledge...
...We cannot escape subjectivity in teaching...
...It has a deeper meaning which every educator ought to attend to, for it is a fact that in the profoundest moral sense we are actors on life's stage...
...Teachers are performers in the sense that they stand to their students as mirrors of humanity--of a significant range of ideals, techniques, and accomplishments that the race has built up through history and judged good...
...It follows that they themselves should be well rehearsed and in some appreciable degree masters of the peculiarly human capacity for "self-enactment," an ability to give evidence before othersof meanings acquired and choices made...
...There is truth in the charge...
...There is, finally, a very practical argument for institutional loyalty: in these hard times divisiveness threatens the very conditions of our survival...
...It has high educative value...
...This schizoid situation is not good for a number of reasons...
...They bear deeply in their psyches the impress of a tight academic order that turns them at an early age into time-keepers--measuring out their days by the credit, by the grade, by the semester, in preparation for their assigned functions in the corporate state...
...In The Idea ofa University Newman argued, conclusively, I think, that what makes for a good teacher is not usually what makes for a good researcher...
...The difficulty is an inherent one because most of the time we are working with the ideas of others...
...The irony of the value neutrality claim is that all too often it is insidiously rooted in value preferences of the crassest sort, in values of control and domination and narrow selfinterest...
...Other ages do not seem to have had this problem...
...VII...
...Increasingly, faculty affect a world-weary tolerance of students because our positions depend on their presence...
...The temptation is strong to consider colleges mere prep schools for graduate work...
...A second value is dialogue, or what I would call informed conversation...
...We hold certain'kinds of knowledge and certain methods of inquiry to be true and reliable because of certain desires and needs we have...
...Democracy, it seems to me, denotes the principal modem contribution to our collective heritages...
...Our sense of allegiance rarely extends beyond the department--or perhaps the interdepartment--to the institution as a whole...
...It must be perfected like all art, rehearsed year in and year out, continually fed by the springs of the imagination...
...The purpose of a college is to educate a moral personality or, to put it in the more modern idiom of Sidney Hook, someone fit for democratic living...
...Most of us perforce begin our teaching careers trained in the habits of the graduate schools...
...nothing new without something old...
...Quis custodiet custodes-- who shall teach the teachers...
...To communicate values is to take education as a serious enterprise of initiating students into a world we consider worthwhile, and that for good and defensible reasons...
...Teach orperish...
...For one thing, it creates artificial and unnecessary tensions that contribute to an illiberal atmosphere...
...The grim seriousness of classroom competition and the chilling impersonalism of college life soon turn student hopes for enduring commitments and meaning into cynical detachment...
...One of the great myths of · academia is that of value neutrality...
...There are alliances to forge with unions, with business, with the professions, and so forth...
...But assuming that it is with us for the foreseeable future, we can take steps to increase its effectiveness...
...Augustine derisively labeled his professors "lip merchants...
...For another, if we are teaching well we aren't likely to have the time to do the kind of research that leads to meaningful publication...
...In the twelfth century John of Salisbury coined the appropriate image...
...There are, to be sure, limits to what can be done in this direction...
...Jack Haley Jr., very tall and thin, his red hair accenting his pale face, reporting on his date with Loretta Young's daughter as we jealously mocked and jeered...
...Somewhere along the way we have lost that sense of wholeness...
...It doesn't...
...For one thing a researcher doesn't have to be a performer--or at least he is a different kind of performer...
...Since we work alone so much of the time it is easy to get the impression that we work for ourselves...
...We must, in existentialist terms, choose our materials not merely in the superficial sense of selecting them but in the deeper sense of making them ours, I suggest that Kierkegaard might serve as an excellent guide in this undertaking...
...Whatever else we teachers are, we are actors engaged in the ancient art of capturing and persuading an audience...
...We learn it In'st of all, respecting its objectivity, but then go on to assimilate, interpret, and enliven it...
...and in some disciplines like the social sciences, publishing is sometimes a natural outcome of this...
...for platform performance, ability to relate to and communicate with the young...
...Dialogue is required by the nature of a democratic society itself which is always an evolving entity, always in the process of self-creation...
...How mindless so much of this is...
...and not always much respected by our students...
...We can't do a great deal and have little time to do it in...
...Don't plagiarize...
...It turned out to be highly popular and of great academic worth as well because it was predicated on the notion that teaching is sharing something worthwhile with students...
...Not the least problem with college teaching is lack of attention to such basic pedagogical requirements...
...But it is a time-honored principle ofpedagogy going all the way back to Socrates that we teach best by example...
...No innovation...
...By talking together in intelligent ways we not only unify society...
...Part of this mandate is to be mindful of the student's humanity too...
...It isn't that bad in the colleges...
...It fosters attitudes of cooperation, social agreement, and organic relationships...
...I cannot, of course, remedy this situation...
...It should in fact be regarded as one of the performing arts...
...A society that respects pluralism, strives for dialogue and achieves a measure of community may well count as an adequate description of a democratic society...
...But I BERNARDMURCHLANDis chairman of the philosophy department at Ohio Wesleyan University.teachers are largely made not born...
...VIII...
...What C. B. Macpherson has called "possessive ifidividualism" is a regnant ideologyand infects academics as well as others in society...
...They are not intellectually at home outside of their fields...
...But the methods and results of inquiry are never neutral in either of these two senses...
...Departmental allegiance is all well and good as far as it goes...
...Whitehead has complained that "'inert ideas" are the bane of undergraduate teaching...
...In this respect a healthy sense of tradition can be helpful...
...They talk about what they do, why they do it, the difficulties they encounter along life's path, and how they feel about a wide range of issues from politics to success...
...Kierkegaard is one of the best pedagogues of modem times because he explored with such sensitivity the mysterious nature of how truth relates to the individual...
...I suppose it is because education in America was so long in the hands of the clergy that we are so skittish about morality talk and make strenuous effortsto extirpate any trace of it from the curriculum...
...SCHROTH,S.J.,formerly associate editor of Commonweal, isAcademic Dean ofRockhurst Collegein Missouri.and test, in another crucible, the process that Fordham had begun--that rite of passage by which we were gradually ripped from the wombs of Catholic Brooklyn, Bayside, Trenton, Jackson Heights, Jersey City, and New Haven and turned loose to compete in the world of Wall Street, law, medicine, and the media which most of our fathers had never cracked but where we might have a fighting chance...
...It might not be a bad idea to give candidates for teaching positions the educational equivalent of a screen test...
...V. Step outside departmental boundaries...
...In its basest and most perverse form it holds that ideas stand in an indifferent relationship to action...
...That is to say, each new insight is "grafted" (to use William James'smetaphor) to our stock of old ideas...
...If der saboteurs do not zurrender, der vomen und children viii be shot...
...Many of us are scandalously underpaid...
...Dewey put it well...
...In reality, we tend to teach as though our students themselves were going to become practitioners in our discipline...
...Morale is understandably low...
...Henri Bergson once advised a group of teachers "to act like men of thought and think like men of action" thereby reacting to a perceived problem in our culture...
...Graduate schools are research oriented and deal in specialized knowledge...
...This is surely no small part of what dialogue in today's society must mean...
...Consequently, the practices of the research scholar are not for the most part appropriate at the undergraduate level...
...Which of us has not cast envious eyes upon other higher paid professionals like lawyers and doctors and even administrators (just why administrators should be paid more than professors is an interesting question in itself...
...I have never quite understood why we tend to discount our humanity in teaching...
...Resistfads...
...His interpretation of Descartes (a more dramatic thinker than is commonly supposed) was a classic...
...The important thing to remember is that college years are short...
...Still, we hang in there...
...I. Remember that teaching is an art...
...We can never close the generation gap and it would be a failure of judgment to try...
...Colleges are teaching institutions and deal for the most part in general and Commonweal: 520 acquired knowledge...
...We are not exempt from the hard discipline that makes for excellence in any art...
...It is by no means obvious that the departmental structure is the best delivery system for knowledge at the undergraduate level...
...How good we feel when our students make it to the prestigious universities...
...The American education system is the most reform-minded of any in the world...
...VIStep outside academic boundaries...
...At one level, pluralism affirms the legitimacy of varying and often conflicting points of view, a democracy of ideas as it is often put...
...Democracy, he said,"is a name for a life of 26 September 1980:521 free and enriching communion...
...It had its seer in Wait Whitman...
...But this is more a bias of faculty members than an intrinsic feature of the order of things...
...It is important, very important, not to fall into the pitfalls of moralizing and indoctrination...
...Interdisciplinary work is one healthy corrective...
...Or even still exist...
...I know that sounds banal but college teaching is often discouraging and always uphill work...
...Thomas Jefferson wanted students at the University of Virginia to have access to local workshops so they could learn manual skills...
...I would say further that to espouse a democratic ideal is to commit oneself to certain modes of action, to certain values...
...Moreover, without a sense of community it is difficult to define institutional goals and even more difficultto attain them--and these afterall should have primacy...
...It was an unforgettable class...
...To force college teachers into the anxiety-provoking role of a researcher is very damaging to classroom effectiveness, to say nothing of a great waste of valuable time, paper, and library space...
...Marjorie Grene, among others, has attacked the neutrality thesis by arguing that "ourjudgments of fact depend on constitutive judgments of value, not the other way around...
...for enthusiasm, posture, voice control, and other qualities we know to be desirable...
...Community, Dewey pointed out, constitutes the idea of democracy itself...
...Students rarely see us out of our roles...
...We should to some appreciable degree be models of integrated experience and be able to articulate convincing connections between ideas and living...
...A Ph.D...
...It might take some time to spell out all the implications of this claim...
...In other words, it makes an ontological statement about personhood...
...Socrates was a stonecutter, equally at ease in the marketplace with the commoners and in the late-night symposia with the ranking intellectuals...
...Certainly we all have to keep up in our fields...
...Nor do I dare characterize our year with a Tom Wolfean catch phrase of my own--except to say that by the time we graduated history had not yet inflicted its wounds...
...I believe an experimental approach might be a step towards resolving a dilemma that everywhere bedevils educational planning...
...One is the value of pluralism...
...It might...
...Ninety-nine percent of teaching is an acquired skill...
...As Manfred Stanley has argued recently, the acquisition of dialogic skills is an act of great moral significance not only because it is the instrumentality by which we arm the citizenry with the various competencies a democratic polity requires, but principally because it is the process by which "we create the forms of symbolic life that eventually dominate our collective conscience...
...We are, he said, like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants...
...Moreover, most college teachers want to teach...
...My point is that there is no necessary connection between the two...
...Still, one must not throw out the baby with the bath water...
...Be human...
...The student's most basic fight as a human being is the fight to be educated and not merely trained or molded...
...How many of the educational reforms of the last ten years have been of genuine worth...
...We can see further than those who preceded us because their labors support our vision...
...Some of the reforms are good and betoken a healthy energy and idealism...
...ROTC--to which, it seemed, all of us belonged as we tramped around the campus on our Wednesday parades counting cadence against the heckling from the dorms (Carl Candels intoning his Gestapo accent into an amplifier on his windowsill, "Vhere are your papers...
...It is mandatory to let essentials be our guide in all reform efforts...
...I remember, complaining to my roommate the In'st night in Dealy dorm that the ticking of his clock was keeping me awake and asking him to put it in the desk drawer...
...But then, in 1955, we entered the Artillery or the Air Force (or the CIA or NSA) not perchance to die, but to see Germany or, if the dice rolled against us, Thule, Greenland...
...But I do not recognize it in Grease or in the seventies' college students' "fifties parties" where the kids slick back their hair into duck's tails and carry their cigarette packs rolled up in the left sleeve of their T-shirts...
...A veritable intellectual feast awaits us in other fields--in genetics, in nuclear physics, in experimental psychology (to name a few areas humanists should be especially acquainted with...
...Which of us has not thought of changing careers at one time or another...
...I am willing to grant that we are over-administered...
...We all too frequently appear before them as disembodied spirits, like Banquo's ghost, emerging from a shadowy world of books and theories and convoluted academic politics to lecture them brieflyon strange ideas that few of them ever really understand and even fewer will ever remember...
...But there is a larger issue of institutional loyalty...
...The solution to this problem is to educate ourselves more broadly...
...If we define education fundamentally as a communication between one human being and another, we are then obligated to respond to the natural desire of students to discover an interrelated pattern of values, something to build their lives on...
...One need not go that far to appreciate his point and realize that teaching and learning involve a high degree of inwardness and passion, a kind of faith, even and above all a love--a love of the materials used and the subjects taught...
...The purpose of a graduate school is to train professionals...
...It is a Socratic task of developing a linguafranca to enable us to communicate across the interest gaps that necessarily develop in a pluralistic society, a task that falls quite naturallyto educators...
...All manner of mumbler and fumbler is allowed to take the podium, Innate talent naturally helps any actor...
...Nor do I claim that publishing has no beneficial effect on teaching...
...The challenge here is to approach our subject matter from the inside...
...Some of my students have called me worse...
...had saved us from the burden of freedom for another two years...
...But the other side of that coin is faculty insularity...
...A root problem of the liberal arts is that most of the faculty are not themselves liberally educated...
...He was almost as good on Sartre...
...A more sophisticated version contends that theories and,methods can be dealt with independently of their subjective origins in emotion and desire...
...Strictly speaking, there are no inert ideas, only inert ways of handling them...
...The mode of the apprehension of the truth, he said, is precisely the truth...
...held in thinly veiled contempt by the general public...
...We swim against a constant current of antiintellectualism and cultural chaos...
...It is important to share this adult experience with students, who are already in so many damaging ways locked away in their youth ghettos...
...Part of our teaching responsibility is to show how ideas grow out of value matrixes--out of personal preferences, social circumstances, and historical forces...
...Michael Oakeshott spoke to this point when he said that "a human life is composed of performances and each performance is a disclosure of a man's beliefs about himself and the world and an exploit in self-enactment...
...Sabbaticals provide an excellent occasion for doing so...
...we are specialists in head knowledge, moving rigidly on the strings of our research like Cartesian automata...
...My more modest aim is to offer some guidelines (commandments is perhaps too pretentious a word) distilled from my own teaching experience...
...Let me qualify...
...To teach with our whole _personsis to teach best, sharing with students not only the results of the high-powered education we have all received (oddly enough most of us are overeducated for what we do) but as well our social and family'experiences, interesting people we have known, good stories we have heard, our travels and hobbies, some seasoned insights into-the human condition, something of our hopes and despair...
...We can soak up enormous amounts of information with much less effort than beginners...
...A major impediment to effective college teaching is an inability to adjust to the special requirements and demands of this quite different kind of activity...
...Humanists, to speak for my own tribe, ought to know at least the methodologiesand history of the social and natural sciences...
...training may focus us narrowly but it has one happy side effect: it makes us good learners...
...how they express our f choices and intentions, and imply consequences in action...
...A few years ago an East Coast university introduced a new course taught entirely by persons from different walks of life...
...Academics are not lacking in honesty and integrity...
...we do more: we create it...
...This is the necessary instrument by which a pluralistic society reaches a workable consensus...
...As Saul Bellow has Herzog say: "The thoughts of geniuses are the canned goods of intellectuals...
...We can all relate sad tales of good teachers who were let go because of a poor publishing record...
...We tend generally to be too encephaiic...
...I don't wish to prohibit those with a desire and a talent to publish from doing so...
...ilCommit value judgments...
...The symptoms of student discontent with this predicament are obvious enough: boredom first of all, then apathy and resentment...
...We have lived...
...As society becomes increasingly splintered, someone is going to have to take the responsibility of building new .bridges...
...A liberal arts college is an ideal place for the faculty itself to become liberally educated...
...There is a certain kind of academic who pants after a change as the hart after-the fresh waters...
...By that I mean an excessive dependency on texts and sources...
...But it is more than that...
...The community of language and thought is the foundation of social community...
...It is a safe prediction that only those colleges with strong institutional identity will survive the dark days ahead...
...The educator's role in making it possible is an enormous one...
...X. Keep your spirits up...
...It is an art that calls for rhetorical skills and metaphorical ingenuity beyond the ordinary...
...Many of 26 September1980:523 them go sour and leave a wide wake of detritus behind them...
...Education, says Oakeshott, is "learning to perform humanly...
...And then we fade away...
...If college teachers in sufficientnumbers were to gain direct experience in the work worlds, new possibilities of dialogue would open up, more fruitful in connecting theory and practice...
...And vice versa...
...have known joy and sorrow (and probably poverty), we can lend our words the weight of considerable experience...
...The only way to get around this dependency is to work out a principle of appropriation, a way of making the sources our own, stamping them with the seal of our own reflection, beliefs, and commitments...
...Our reformist impulses should be kept under the tightest control...
...Others may find them useful...
...no future without a past...
...One practical way to do this is to take courses from colleagues in the relevant disciplines...
...For the sake of brevity, let me note three minimal values entailed by the democratic ideal...
...Some of us may accidentally have gained some teaching experience along the way as teaching assistants or whatever...
...It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication...
...I have derived immense benefit from Commonweal:522 teamwork with historians, physicists, classicists, and assorted social scientists as well as other humanists...
...I see this as yet another instance of the more generalizedsocial phenomenon of private interests crowding out public ones...
...They might be tested for clarity and competence...
...The Greeks attached high importance to logos--to reasoned conversation--and took it to be the distinguishing mark of our humanity...
...One day he played out a heated dialogue between the two...
...To do this we must attend closely to the various languages of ,work and respond intelligently to them...
...Nonetheless we are inclined to adopt an authoritarian and intimidating manner in our dealings with students, to look upon them as mere occasions to wield our expertise, to deliver the truth from on high.These days there is much plaintive talk in faculty lounges about the woeful ignorance of students, thus obfuscating the real point at issue: to accept them as they are and teach them...
...To communicate values, as I understand that admittedly slippery term, is to educate in light of a cultural ideal...
...But increasingly they are resorting to the courts and paraiegal mechanisms like grievance committees as a defense...
...to prolong II| FATHER RAYMONDA...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 17
