Notes on Teachers

I’ve always thought the key statement about the futility of book learning to be the one in Plato’s Phaedrus. Plato has Socrates say that the invention of writing is unfortunate because a) Writing, unlike a teacher, doesn’t know when to be silent in the face of ignorance, and b) Students depend on writing to remember and so enfeeble their own minds. This is schoolmarm crankiness, but it also suggests a truth about the sad lot of the teacher: no longer the admired illiterate charlatan of a pre-Socratic sect, he becomes the custodian of an impersonal system of information retrieval. Knowledge is no longer magic, transformative of the knower, but a dry text about which we must be careful not to show too much contempt when the teacher is around. After all, he’d fail us if he knew what we really think of him. The conceptual gap between oral culture and cuneiform tablets is vaster than between cuneiform and iPod. As literates, we’ll never understand the perspective of an oral culture. We may as well try to think like a dolphin—or like Socrates. The anthropological and linguistic studies of oral cultures were merely self-referential works. Reading Homer is the closest we can come. And yet, even if we’re strong enough to disregard all spurious “traditions,” what we glean must necessarily be translated into our Gutenberg galaxy. Even Bill and Tedding back in time to hear Homer (who must have considered himself more teacher than entertainer) could not be more than an act of illiterate-tourism. As a humanities teacher, if I ask myself what one thing I would most like to teach my students, it would be hard not to express it as a didactic statement—and so not a “thing” but a “should.” You, the student, “should” make every effort to understand your direct and immediate relationship to culture, language, society and history, because if you do not, you will be enslaved effortlessly by the prevailing false systems of meaning. Something like that. Of course it would be unfair and outrageously self-indulgent to speak that way in a classroom. Besides, the argument has always lain open to criticism. Its most eloquent defense is also its shakiest: that such a belief has sustained multiple generations of secular humanists through centuries of brutal and psychotic Western history. Well then, the precocious student sighs with David Hume, why should future histories be anything like past histories? After all, my education is much more important than any bullshit mawkish theory of Western Civ.—this is my job prospects we’re talking about, etc. At any rate, that “lesson” is one that students must accept or reject for themselves after a long series of courses taught by like-minded teachers. We must accept that most post-secondary students will never face such favourable conditions. The other standard objection is that the teacher, as a demystifier and shareholder in Enlightenment Inc., must teach facts—verifiable things, not normative shoulds. So we have the text. The text is the prop in the teacher’s Keatonesque performance, to be taught and fallen all over by whatever exegetical blarney infects him. The student senses immediately that the answers—or even a molecule of truth—are not in the text. The correct answers are in the miserable dialectic of the teacher’s laboured questions, gestures, inflecting eyebrows, grinding teeth, carefully set shoulders (this is one reason why women, as superior readers of body language, perform better in Socratic environments). Pythagoras taught his followers that by imitating his motions, music and gestures, his students would gain insight into his mathematical doctrines and grow into priests of power. Today’s teacher offers a much more sad-sack model—that of a schoolteacher. The crushing systems of writing and information storage loom and lurk between him and his students. Even memorizing the text wouldn’t satisfy the teacher; he would still claim that you cheated and had failed to satisfy the unwritten criterion of proving that you’re not lazy…so why try? Anyway, it’s obvious he must have failed at something else even to be here—no wonder he hates you.