Be the teacher
It’s an old line: When asked about the experience of teaching, a teacher replies that he learned more from the students than they learned from him. One can understand the impulse, and why the answer endures as a kind of proverb or cliché: it’s an expression of humility; it resists the impression of the master dispensing Knowledge from on high; it conjures a classroom in which student and teacher collaborate together in the search for knowledge; it appeals to our democratic sensibilities; it might even tickle our know-nothing instincts, dormant though they may be. In truth, the answer might be little more than a deflection. What teacher wants to say outright, “Yes, I’m a fantastic and knowledgeable teachers and my students are lucky to have me”?
Nevertheless. I want to call bunk on this nonsensical and finally destructive reflex.
To begin, it is usually (not always) a false modesty and thus a false humility on display. No teacher worth her salt really believes her students have more to teach her than vice versa. If that were true she wouldn’t be a teacher in the first place. It would amount to vocational malpractice. You are a teacher because you have something to teach. If you don’t, then you should probably consider another profession.
Moreover, such a view misunderstands the nature of the student. The student is not already equipped, albeit awaiting something like activation. The student is a learner, and a learner needs to learn. The teacher is both the facilitator and the source of that learning. The teacher possesses something the student lacks, and it is her special privilege to help the student to come into possession of it, too. In that way there is an egalitarian element to teaching: what one communicates is not thereby lost; when you teach me and I learn, we both have knowledge that, before, you had and I did not. That is one of the beauties of teaching and learning, namely that there is no competition intrinsic to it. You and I can both know X equally and fully, and neither suffers as a result. It’s zero sum.
But precisely because knowledge is a shared or common good in this sense, when one lacks it he really lacks it. The relationship between a teacher and a student, then, is not equal from the start. It is unequal. That is what makes the teacher a teacher and the student a student. “Inequality” here has nothing to do with worth or value; nor does it have to do with everything that might count for knowledge, only with the particular type or range of knowledge in question. I have a friend who builds energy-efficient homes from scratch. In the realm of building energy-efficient homes, he is the master and I am the apprentice. (Better: I’m a flat zero.) The roles are reversed in the realm of theology. If we were to suppose otherwise, it would be sheer pretense.
Imagine a chemistry class in which the teacher claimed to learn more from the students than she taught them. Is such a claim even intelligible? Perhaps, at a stretch, there is an equivocation here: she means to say that she has learned about some other matter—life, or the resilience of this generation of students, or the lovely array of diverse backgrounds and cultures represented in the classroom. That’s as may be, but it’s not germane to the point. For she is a chemistry teacher. She teaches chemistry to students who need to learn it. That there are other or additional exchanges of various forms of knowledge happening alongside the chemistry-teaching is at once a happy fact and irrelevant to the question of whether she, the teacher, is teaching them, the students, the subject of which she is an expert. If she isn’t, we’ve got a problem.
I detect at least two anxieties here. One is a fear of authority, wedded to or underwritten by doubt about expertise. We wonder whether expertise really exists (does that imply some people are smarter than others? that some are better educated than others? than some simply know more than others, and always will?), but even if it does exist, we doubt whether it can be wielded with authority in a way that avoids abuse. For if abuse is endemic to the exercise of authority, better to deny or abolish the latter than to provide unwitting cover for the former.
The second anxiety belongs to the humanities. That is to say, most of us would admit that a chemist or a geologist or an epidemiologist(!) knows his stuff, and the stuff he knows is stuff we don’t. But for academics outside the STEM fields, there is a widespread suspicion—a simmering low-grade feeling—that what we trade in is not so much knowledge as it is, well, opinions and ideas clothed in jargon. So that, in a strong sense, we don’t have anything to teach our students. In which case they have as much to teach us as we them. After all, if it’s contested readings all the way down, who’s to say they won’t propose a reading as good as, or better than, ours?
I’m not an English professor, so I won’t comment on why language and literature should see itself as a true disciplina or Wissenschaft akin to biology or mathematics. My minimal point is that, even in those disciplines that most explicitly and critically practice and foster the arts of interpretation (and, spoiler, no human inquiry, however empirical, is exempt from these arts), the teacher has something to hand on to her students, and she should do so with gusto. If she had nothing, she could not and would not be a teacher. As it stands, she does and she is, and so her posture should be one of confident authority, not false modesty. Students learn when we know what we are doing and do it without apology. They do not learn when we pretend to lack what they so desperately need.
I sometimes wonder whether the abdication of pedagogical authority is rooted in a false diagnosis of “students these days.” As though they already know what they need to know; or, if they do not, then their exquisitely sensitive egos can’t stand the suggestion that they need to learn what they don’t know. Neither is true, at least in my experience. My students don’t think they know everything already. Almost to a person, they are eager to admit how little they know, and how much they want to learn. That doesn’t mean they simply take my word for it (nor should they). But no one’s egos are being bruised when I teach them as one whose training has prepared him to teach theology with some measure of authority (an authority that is relative in more than one respect: relative to their other courses in theological subjects; relative to their courses in other disciplines; relative to the teachings of the church; relative to the testimony of Holy Scripture; relative, ultimately, to God, the source of all knowledge and the supreme authority). On the contrary, my students lean forward in their seats. They see from my own passion for the material, first, that this thing matters; second, that it is substantial, hefty, neither thin gruel nor small beer; and third, that it is therefore worth desiring for its own sake. It stands apart both from them and from me: it’s the thing I keep pointing toward, gesturing at, like the finger of the Baptist. It’s real, it’s good, and it’s worth knowing—precisely because they only barely glimpse it, at least at first.
That’s the magic. That’s what can happen when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got something to teach folks who are ready to learn. Be the teacher, and the rest falls into place.
