Learning is a difficult endeavor. It is not simply the downloading of facts into minds, as if the human brain were simply another physical platform analogous to a computer’s hard drive, although our habit of referring to the latter as “memory” blurs the distinction. Were this the case, we might judge public investment in numerous physical K–12 schools as a colossal waste of funds when we could just program the children from the safety of their homes (although we saw how poorly that works—how ill fit the human being is to be made a machine—during the COVID lockdowns). Rather, learning requires community, and the community of the classroom is one of the first models children possess for civic life, as Kathleen O’Toole wrote in The American Mind recently. The analogy suggests that, more than pure seminar-style classes, what we need to encourage civic virtue is a revitalized understanding of the role of the teacher, whose role mediates true authority and provides clarity to the students that the truth exists beyond their immediate opinions, even if it must be searched for by arduous quest.
In conservative discourse on education, typically the teacher is the bogeyman, the haunting presence of the classroom who adorns its walls with whatever ideological symbols you can imagine. This specter can be exorcised by the classical school, which replaces ideological indoctrination with a teacher who simply moderates a great books seminar, at least in the later years of high school. As O’Toole puts it, “In a well-run seminar, teachers merely provide a question about a great work of literature, history, or philosophy, intervening to guide the discussion only rarely.” Such courses in high school require students who have been well educated in their prior schooling, learning to read capably so as to prepare for class such that their arguments about Homer or Milton are not immediate dead ends. But more than that, a successful seminar requires not merely the capacity to understand great works of philosophy or literature but the desire to understand. The most agonizing type of seminar is that in which students are simply uninterested in the questions proposed, with no interest in proposing questions of their own. What is one to do in such circumstances?
While exaggerated, of course, by the glamour of Hollywood, every touching school film of the last fifty years has a point: The person of the teacher matters as someone who mediates or models desire. Take for instance, Dead Poets Society (1989), starring Robin Williams as John Keating, the inspirational English teacher. While there of course has been a great deal of criticism of the film’s romantic vision of the rigidity of traditional institutions vs. the heroic role of the outcast, the tyrannical parents vs. the innocent, authentic youths (in my mind, criticism rightly made), one thing the film gets right is the need of students for true authority in the person of the teacher.
The person of the teacher matters as someone who mediates or models desire.
The irony of the film is that Keating does not properly apprehend his role, telling a colleague he “always thought the idea of educating was to learn to think for yourself,” shortly after he has set the boys doing silly walks by his own orders, modeling an antiauthoritarian stance for them to follow. Keating is a counter-model to the rigid, desireless authoritarianism of Welton Academy, such that the students revitalize his old “dead poets society,” reading Whitman among others in the woods at night. By his or her presence in the classroom, the teacher can model for students a love for philosophy, for history, for literature, that will make them desire the answers to such questions that form the basis for a good seminar, and that desire will lead them to the kind of conduct (studying well) that leads such seminars to be a pedagogical success.
At its best, such success can come about at the students’ initiative. I recall the professional bliss when, on one autumn day in Irving, Texas, a student of mine stormed into our classroom at the University of Dallas and exclaimed, “How does Zeus get off treating Hera this way?” We had been reading the Iliad in the freshman literary tradition course and her Catholic sensibilities were duly affronted that a wife—even one of a pagan god—should be treated with such disrespect. I suggested a few passages for us to read out loud and examine, and the class discussion largely carried itself along, just like O’Toole’s ideal seminar. But I will note a few aspects of this situation: This occurred after several weeks of my proposing questions about the poem, and that level of energy in that particular classroom was rare.
How had I encouraged them to reach this level of discussion, even for a moment? I had not only raised a number of questions about the poem, encouraging them in discussion from the beginning of the class—making clear that their learning could not be done without their own active engagement—but I had also presented some of my own interpretations. Many teachers who have taught in something resembling a seminar environment know that frequently students, when reaching the end of the class period, will ask their professor, “But what do you think?” They rightly have an intuition that the one who has studied the material of the course before them, with more years of philosophical maturity, ought to have something to say. They ought to be able “to profess,” as Louise Cowan—one of the co-founders of the University of Dallas’s undergraduate curriculum and interdisciplinary PhD program—used to say. They are not always looking for “the right answer” to memorize for future tests but rather a guarantee that there can be an authority generated by the search for truth, which proves truth is attainable and not merely an elusive specter apparently pursued in the midst of what is really functionalist job training.
Recovering the role of the professor is crucial for our society because it will be an occasion for the recovery of authority, as opposed to the all-too-frequent reduction of all credibility to manipulative power that marks our postmodern mindset. In the pure seminar, O’Toole claims, “as in life, no authority swoops in to give the right answer and make decisions for everyone else,” but this is already a mistaken understanding of authority. While an authority may truly be more able than others to give a right answer—think of a skilled, honest auto mechanic or plumber, for instance—those responding to the authority are able to consent or repudiate. It does take time and skill to determine true authority from false (again, the auto mechanic is a good analogue), but once one has developed a relationship of trust, consent to the truth is participation in the judgment of one who knows.
I agree with O’Toole that students should “humble themselves before an author and a text, to scrutinize their own opinions, and to discard error in favor of knowledge.” But it is important to recognize the teacher, properly formed in the tradition, as a source of authority, such that we and our students can participate in the work of the citizen, which, as Aristotle put it in his Politics, is “willing to be governed and to govern with a view to the life of virtue.”