The Future of Teaching

Abstract

N THIS paper I am concerned with only one kind of teaching, the kind of teaching with which apparently too few administrators in higher education are concerned. I mean the ancient, crucial, high art of teaching, the kind of teaching which alone can claim to be called educational, an essential element in all noble human culture, and hence a task of infinitely more importance than research scholarship. With the teacher as transmitter or conductor of knowledge, as servant or partner of research, I have no concern. He is useful and necessary and, because he does the bulk of university teaching, it is important that his job be effectively performed and intelligently evaluated. But so long as the teacher is viewed as merely a diffuser of knowledge or a higher popularizer, his position will necessarily be a modest and even menial one. And precisely this, I think, is the prevalent view of the teacher's function, the view overwhelmingly assumed even among those who want to redress the balance in favor of the teacher. Is it any wonder then that the teacher enjoys no honor? For if the teacher stands to the scholar as the pianist to the composer, there can be no question of parity; teaching of this kind is necessary but secondary. So too is the comparatively subtler and more difficult kind of teaching that is concerned with scholarly methodology and the crucial skeletal skills of creative research. Only when large demands are made on the teacher, when we ask him to assume a primary role as educator in his own right, will it be possible to restore dignity to teaching. Teaching, I repeat, is not honored among us either because its function is grossly misconceived or its cultural value not understood. The reason for this is the overwhelming positivism of our technocratic society and the arrogance of scholarship. Behind the disregard for the teacher lies the transparent sickness of the humanities in the university and in American life generally. Indeed, nothing more vividly illustrates the myopia of academic humanism than its failure to realize that the fate of any true culture is revealed in the value it sets