Jacques Barzun: Teacher in America. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1945.
“We have latterly had too much educational discussion,” Barzun remarks, and it must be said that the situation has not improved. (He says the same thing about political theory and, given the level of political theory in the first half of the twentieth century, who can blame him?) “A lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life” and “synonymous with civilization,” education may come “because of the teaching [a person] has had, sometimes in spite of it,” as Henry Adams shows in own somewhat wayward way. Parents and teachers (much less school administrators) don’t educate; they teach, and usually the administrators don’t even do that. The grand ambitions of self-styled ‘educators’ therefore have “practical limits.” You can’t become a civilized person just by learning stuff, even true stuff. Citizen virtues and other features of the cultivated soul “occur as by-products” of teaching. They are “connected with good teaching,” to be sure, but not the same as it.
Teaching consists of the art of showing a pupil how to do things for himself. A pupil has his own moral and intellectual structure, which must be attended to. Souls can be induced to learn so long teachers relate the facts they convey to principles and persons—Washington, D.C. to George Washington. “All valuable learning hangs together and works by associations which make sense.” At the same time, this intellectual side of the thing requires moral supplement, habituation. “There are only two such habits”: thinking and attention. Both can be fostered by example, whether the teacher lectures, leads a discussion, or tutors; “the effective agent is the living person,” teacher and pupil alike. In this, the live person has an advantage over a book, although Barzun does not of course scant books, recommending that they be read by oneself, away from those sections of libraries that buzz with whispers. (“Reading, true reading, is the solitary vice par excellence.”) And avoid the sort of books given to pupils in teachers’ colleges, written in the “ghoulish Desperanto” of people who miscall themselves educators. It may be worth noting that John Dewey, master of clunky Germanish English, was Barzun’s older contemporary at Columbia. Columbia Teachers’ College, at that.
As to reading itself, “the child who is a born reader will of course go through phases of continuous reading, which has a way of getting on the nerves of family and friends.” Reading is nonetheless good, rereading even better, as it fosters thought. Teachers can help by concentrating their pupils’ attention on select passages from the books assigned—the “French explication de texte.” This will enable, if not guarantee, that the pupil becomes a student, “gaining an idea of what can be done by applying one’s mind and using others’ ideas,” by “begin[ning] to discover the need for interpreting, the ways of testing a preference for one interpretation over another, and the desirability of checking doctrinaire inclinations in an uncertain world.” And he will learn, not so much from the teacher as from the writers they study together, that “in the realm of mind as represented by great men, there is no such thing as separate, isolated ‘subjects,'” that Shakespeare knows a thing or two about medicine, psychology, history, and can integrate what he knows into a comprehensive understanding of the whole. Only such integration can come to ‘make sense’ to a person. And so the one who attempts to teach algebra shouldn’t neglect to say what algebra is for, “what exponents mean apart from their handling.” Indeed, “being part of the logical sciences, it should be taught in conjunction with informal elementary logic,” as that can engage the students in “the fascination of the mind’s ability to test its own inward workings.” There is a moral dimension to such a fascination, as “the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.”
Moving through the academic ‘disciplines’ from reading and mathematics to the sciences, Barzun recalls that at the turn of his century science replaced Latin and Greek in the curricula of American schools. This happened because classicists attempted to imitate science, reducing “their field to a wasteland of verbal criticism, grammar, and philology” and neglecting the substance of the Latin and Greek writers, the wisdom they offer, which modern science cannot match. “Naturally the classics were exterminated, for science could beat them at their own game,” which had exchanged theoretical and practical wisdom for ‘pragmatism.’ Young man, do you want to be practical? Very well, chemistry can offer you a better-paying job than any of the schools still offering Latin classes. “That is what invariably comes of trying to put belles-lettres into utilitarian envelopes.” Better to treat the sciences “as humanities.” Making them fields for specialists alone “made possible the present folly in Germany” (that would be Nazism) by splitting its people into “three groups: the technicians, the citizens, and the irresponsible rabble,” a regime in which “the rabble together with the technicians can cow the citizenry.” “Such principles will hardly give long life and happiness to a democracy,” the regime that must “have more citizens than anything else.” Without that preponderance, citizens “will find not only that representative government has slipped out of their fingers, but that have also lost their commanding position,” enslaved to their new masters.
“All this clearly depends on teaching our easygoing, rather credulous college boys and girls what science is. If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they thin scientists are the only honest, patient and careful workers in the world”; that “theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible”; and that, accordingly, “science steadily and automatically makes for a better world”; then “they have wasted their time in the science lecture rule” and have become “a menace,” believing either that their mastery of science bestows authority upon them or that their failure to master science disqualifies them from positions of authority altogether. To avoid this, Barzun recommends not a ‘survey course’ in science but an “intelligent introduction” to “the principles of physical science,” demarcating science’s powers and limitations.
What’s now called science was once a part of philosophy. But by the 1880s in America, scientists had convinced many academic philosophers that science could bring certain answers to their ponderings—rather in in the manner that Paul the Apostle ridiculed the philosophers (or perhaps sophists) of his own time that Christianity showed the straight way that obviated the zetetic practice of always searching, never finding. Against this, Barzun urges that “the classics, philosophy, and science are at once overlapping and complementary disciplines,” and their history ought not to be neglected. He knows that ‘history’ means not the course of events but a narrative of a course of events, that “history as such does not exist,” as it’s “always the history—the story—of something,” an “account of man in society.” Its intrinsic interest lies in being about ourselves, “men being by definition interested in themselves.” Action, thought, chance: history consists of an account of these; good history should not however “be treated as a moral tale until the student knows a fair quantity of facts,” ballast against the errant sailing that comes from airy moralizing. The art of teaching history “consists in making the student see” that the actions and thoughts of men, and in particular their motives for acting, “resemble his own, at the same time as they are subtly modified by conditions and ideas and hopes now beyond recall.” Absence of teaching means that an American who knows what the Monroe Doctrine is, very much including its original purpose, will better understand, and perhaps better respond to, today’s Latin American who objects to it. The student who possesses this “historical sense” will understand “his neighbors, his government, and the limitations of mankind much better,” less inclined to “being taken in…by panicky fears [or] by second-rate Utopias.” The historical sense, so understood, becomes “a moderator which insists on knowing conditions before passing judgments”; in this, “the historical sense is above all political-minded,” tending “to make men tolerant, without on that account weakening their determination to follow the right,” inasmuch as “they know too well the odds against it.”
As to the fine arts, Barzun cautions against “trying to approach the professional standard of performance,” which makes it “necessary to concentrate on doing at the expense of thinking,” to musically illiterate specialists. “A knowledge of the history of art is ultimately necessary for the best kind of enjoyment and performance—even and especially by the master.” “The very reason why art is worth teaching at all is that it gives men the best sense of how rich, how diverse, how miraculous are the expressions of the human spirit through the ages”—the theme of André Malraux’s writing at that time, as well. In this, again, “the college does not pretend to ‘educate,'” as “it can only furnish the means of later self-education” by having students see pictures and sculptures, listen to music, and by giving them a sense of the history of what they are looking at and hearing. “The aim is not to make picture dealers or musical stenographers, but to teach to future ‘educated’ citizens two new and special languages—visual and auditory,” thereby “mak[ing] sensations more accurate and inward reflection richer by associations with these concrete experiences.” This “break[s] down self-will for the sake of finding out what life and its objects may really be like,” as “most esthetic matters turn out to be moral ones in the end”—great art offering “a choice” of “preferring strength to weakness, truth to softness, life to lotus-eating.” Barzun’s identification of fine arts with languages points to the benefit of learning foreign languages, which “lets you into the workings of other human minds, like and unlike your own,” introducing you to “real things [that] are untranslatable: gemütlich, raison d’être, dolce far niente, high life, and so on.”
Having addressed each of the subject areas of teaching, drawing out the relations among them, Barzun returns to a consideration of the great books whose authors show that they have done that better than he can claim to do. “A great book is in effect a view of the universe, complete for the time being. You must get inside it to look out upon the old familiar world with the author’s unfamiliar eyes.” For his part, a teacher must remember that his pupils are reading the book “for the first time,” that “the discussion of any classic” in the classroom “must be superficial” for that reason. “Fortunately there are connections between one great book and another, which enable us to capitalize on our reading experience,” enabling readers to learn not only from each book itself but from what one book says about the others. Interest in reading the great books revived in the 1920s, in the wake of the scientistic takeover of higher education, with the publication of John Erskine’s The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. St. Johns College and the University of Chicago then attempted to ‘institutionalize’ such study with their great-books curricula. Barzun demurs. “St. Johns tries to do in college what the educated man should be expected to do for himself ten or fifteen years after his graduation.” And institutionalization inclines to methodization, which will not do when inquiring into works that resist methodical treatment. Rather, “a teacher who wants to read a series of books with his students will be well advised to show a kind of willing discipleship shifting ground from book to book. He must be a Christian moralist with Dante a skeptic with Lucretius, and a pantheist with Goethe” since, “if he wants the reader to lend their minds, he must himself be able to do it.” Above all, “Don’t talk to me about the Greeks: read them!”
How, then, shall teaching, if not education, be institutionalized? Barzun is rather partial to the approach taken by his own institution, Columbia College. During the First World War, Columbia teachers and administrators understood the conflict to involve a challenge not only to the American regime but to Western civilization. They introduced a compulsory course for freshmen titled “An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” eventually extended to two years, then supplemented by courses in the Humanities and the Sciences. With those (again, necessarily superficial) courses completed, the Columbia student “not only fills his head with fair pictures of reality, but…begins to think with tolerable good sense about what he himself wishes to do, both in his next two college years and later on.” To accomplish this, the College needs “a good staff, willing to work like dogs with small discussion groups,” teachers supported by administrators who can “make the three required courses fit into the time available.” Ultimately, “either the basic, required collegiate preparation will be seriously breached, or the basic required vocational preparation will have to yield.” Barzun is inclined to insist on the collegiate preparation, as it gives students the chance to become whole men and real citizens.
What about those administrators? “Nothing so strikes the foreign observer with surprise as the size and power of American collegiate administration”—and bear in mind that Barzun writes this in 1945, innocent of subsequent elaborations, many imposed by the overarching administrative states, federal and ‘state,’ which regulate and subsidize colleges and universities at the price of requiring teaching institutions to imitate the institutions of modern statism. Even then, administrators had organized themselves into a “planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun.” Despite occasional eclipses within such systems, “usually more sympathy obtains among fellow administrators than between them and the teaching personnel,” and “if it came to a pitched battle, I feel sure that the ore compact executive troops, animated by a single purpose, besides being better fed and self-disciplined, could rout the more numerous but disorderly rabble that teaches.” Disorderly, because faculty meetings prove stages of contention; “it would take a philosopher-king to rule over such a roost.” Therefore, the best practicable regime is the one “laid out so as to guarantee a reasonable freedom” to teach, research, write. When lost, “the battle for academic freedom” takes on “the grimness of an execution by the secret police,” as “a teacher is dropped, silently, callously, with the clear intent of an unfrocking and of an attainder against his dependents” against which “there is no redress, for it occurs usually too low in the world of educational institutions, it concerns too small a post, and it can command no publicity.”
Barzun suggests a remedy. Faculty members and administrators should ask themselves three questions about the accused: “Has the teacher the right to express his opinion on the mooted subject in the classroom” Has he the right to express it outside? And finally, “has he the right to use class time to convert students to his opinion?” The answer to the last question should be a firm ‘no,’ as students, “who are perhaps compelled to listen to him, have every right to complain if they are preached at instead of instructed.” With respect to the first question, the teacher has the right to express his opinion on topics within his sphere of authority, “no matter who disapproves and for what reason.” Admittedly, “the cost of this freedom may be a good deal of crackpot error, but nothing good goes unpaid for: this is the price.” As to topics beyond his sphere, the teacher properly enjoys “not academic freedom, but academic responsibility,” observing “the same tact that he would in good society.” Similarly, his students “have no right to publish what is said in class, or they kill its informality.” As to opinions expressed outside the university, he has a citizen’s freedom to speak freely, so long as he “make[s] it clear to his hearers or readers when he is speaking as a citizen and when as a University expert on some special branch.” If his reader would think about these matters further, Barzun recommends “the classic and definitive” statements on academic freedom made by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell during the First World War, in defense of the socialist Harold Laski. [1] And finally, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: “The important thing is to be sure you are hiring a teacher and not a wolf wrapped in a sheepskin.” Once hired, a teacher’s popularity or lack of same should have no bearing on his treatment. “Let those who dislike him drop his course.”
As to the institutional qualifications of faculty members, Barzun deems the doctoral degree to have become an “initiation into the most expensive and least luxurious club in the world.” It “shows nothing about teaching ability” and, “as a ritual, it is one of those unlucky importations from Europe—largely due to the influence of Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins,” the first American university modeled on German academic institutions. Barzun concedes that the Ph.D in science makes some sense, “represent[ing] good sound experimental work.” Doctorates in education, on the other hand, “cover such a wide range of indefinite subject matter that they have been repeatedly and deservedly ridiculed.” Their bearers have learned teaching “methods”; “by racking his wits and the dictionary, an educator,” as he is called, “can devise methods for subjects he does not know and for subjects that have no matter in them,” producing textbooks “almost as large and medical and law books” which “seldom do more than pad out statistical matters of fact ” in “the educators” lingo” Barzun had scored earlier. More generally, he deplores the conflict between teaching and scholarship seen when candidates for advanced degrees are required to research and write while meeting students. “Writing a first book and learning to teach are almost always incompatible occupations; and attempting both under a superior’s eye adds to the strain.” “The octopus has him in its grip and does not let him go.”
By 1945, American schools had begun the now-familiar practice of standardized testing for ‘aptitudes.’ But if “every college should…be dedicated to Intellect”—that is, to “Mind, free and restless in its desire to experience, comprehend, and use reality,” such tests “should go.” “Unless we recognize Intelligence as the general quality I tried to define, we shall all bow down in a morass of ill-defined virtues, aptitudes, and accomplishments,” inasmuch as “the only yardstick fit to measure an Intelligence with is another Intelligence.” Is this objective, scientific? Well, no. “Objectivity applies, as its name suggests, to objects,” and “science cannot help us classify the things we care about when we enter the realm of mind.” Intelligence belongs to persons, not objects. (And, one now must add, objects that are artifacts; there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, although there is intelligent artfulness).
Teaching is by and for persons. A teacher with any sense of this reality at all will know that “students are in college solely to pass courses, and that they are moved exclusively by zest for learning.” This reality has implications for conduct. “Friendship between an instructor and a student is impossible” because “friendship has strict prerequisites, among them, freedom of choice and equality of status,” neither of which “can exist in thee teacher-student relation.” That goes especially for teacher-student romances, as it’s “bad for love-making to combine it with a desire to improve and be improved.”
Nor should colleges worry too much about what students want. It will always be something. “The customer is always right, perhaps, but not so the student,” and with students “reproof and encouragement must be administered together.” Don’t pay too much attention to student demands for special treatment. “The blind boys tend to think their achievement so remarkable that they should earn Phi Beta Kappa with B’s when others need A’s.” Their achievement is remarkable, but it is not a Phi Beta Kappa-worthy achievement. These are two separate kinds of achievement. In dealing with students, “partiality and pity are fatal.” If you bend the rules for a student laboring under difficult circumstances, bend them only with regard to “practical details—an extension of time, a special examination, extra hours of tutoring missed—anything of this kind and nothing that damages the prize worked for.” Moreover, “the meaning of this hard leniency must be pointed out as a lesson in itself.”
When he turns to women in college, Barzun misses something, namely, the parenting he’d initially mentioned. With women, he laments, five years after graduation, “where has all the philosophy and English literature and mathematics gone to?” In the 1940s, to be sure, most of it went into the nursery, where it lent no expertise in the tasks of comforting infants and changing their diapers. College-educated women “are probably handicapped by four years of leisure and learning for the battle of life over crib and stove.” This would be true if crib and stove were the only tasks mothers undertake. But if, as Barzun has stipulated, parents are the first teachers of children, do they not also engage them in conversation? Even absent the careers essayed by women inspired two decades later by Second Wave Feminism, surely a devoted ‘stay-at-home’ mother has always had more to do than shop for food, clean the house, prepare meals, and wash dishes. Contra Barzun, “their imagination about the distant or the abstract” need not be “completely atrophied.” And even he relents, maintaining that qualified women should be in college but need a somewhat different type of pedagogy than the men. Most women are less prone to abstract thinking (for better or for worse), “less interested than boys in theory, in ideas, in the logic of things and events.” College teachers should go against that grain, indirectly. “If the teacher takes pains to show repeatedly that concrete harm, good, suffering, pleasure or profit follows from some belief or truth in question, a beginning can be made of substituting reason for memory.” With women, “every event or proposition must be related to human motives, lest it be automatically discounted as one of those wild things that men do or say and that count for nothing.” The reward goes beyond the parenting that Barzun scants. “The highest form of sociability is the conversation of educated men and women.”
“The right to education must remain on an equal footing with every other right, namely, the footing of being available insofar as the claimant shows the power to deserve it.” Barzun insists that this in no way contradicts democracy, as “the existence of superior brains does not touch in the slightest the theoretical bases of democratic government,” as “the true notion of equality is not identity but equivalence of treatment”—equal things to equals, as Aristotle puts it. In any classroom there will be some students better at the work than others, and this can be made good if “the more gifted learn to appreciate other men’s difficulties” and the less gifted “to gauge other men’s powers.” “No tampering with either [the college’s] ingredients or its standards of quality” should be countenanced.
So, yes, do require students to read great books, not only to listen to the teacher’s summaries and comments. “For a man to find his way through to the real Nietzsche or Darwin is a laborious task. He must forget what he ‘knows'”—that is, what he’s heard about the author—and “read Nietzsche himself, not one book merely but perhaps as many as three, lending his mind to each, while comparing and assimilating.”
That is the real business of the college, but since the business of America is business money will be needed to support it, and money talks. It seldom speaks intelligently, preferring to subsidize athletic scholarships, projects designed to ameliorate social and medical ills, and grand buildings instead of college business. As things then stood, the ratio of donations was “two to one in favor of serving animal needs—and the distribution of cash makes it more like one hundred and fifty to one.” Scholarships should go to students who show evidence of “talent, achievement, and promise,” not poverty or alumni connections. Barzun offers a compromise: “If the alumni must have invincible teams, let them continue to send promising athletes to their alma mater, but since this often requires stead ‘co-operation’ on the part of the admitting authorities as well as the teaching staff, let the alumni clubs be told that every second recipient of their support be a genuine student.”
This is to acknowledge what politic philosophers have understood for millennia, that “the teacher and thinker must constantly bear in mind special conditions that define his craft,” as Barzun delicately puts it. “He has on his side only mankind’s desire for light—the light that gives all other things their shape; and this, though a strong motive, is easily obscured by more immediate demands. The teacher must consequently sustain it most steadfastly in the very persons who neglect or forget it easily.” The example of Socrates, and of thinkers and teachers in the contemporary regimes of fascism and communism, have made that point more starkly, but as a teacher in America Barzun can concentrate on the need for decent salaries. “If the Field Marshall is not ashamed to admit that money is the sinews of war, the teacher should feel no qualms in proclaiming that alma mater means first of all the nourishing mother.” That is a form of motherhood Barzun does indeed esteem.
This brings Barzun to his final topics, family and polity. In a display of his excellent judgment, he begins with the chapter on marriage in Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s The Intellectual Life. As Hamerton sees, “the world is not organized for the life of the mind” but for “business and domesticity.” In marriage, “people who are not systematically broken in to living with a professional thinker cannot overcome their ingrained disbelief in the reasonableness of so irregular an existence.” Most “brain workers” do not “know how to protect their vigils,” how to ignore telephone calls and ringing doorbells in order to preserve “the will-o’-the-wisp of mental effort,” a thought which, “if postponed may be lost forever.” Hamerton’s recommendation, marrying a nice peasant girl, was already a fading prospect in the 1880s when he wrote his book, “the afterglow of a golden age.” “There are no peasant girls,” anymore; “the man of thought must face the educated woman of the twentieth century—if he finds one to his taste—and work out his intellectual salvation with her or against her.” That “thinking is inwardly a haphazard, fitful, incoherent activity” is “perhaps the least suspected fact of the intellectual life,” and its vulnerability to persecution intended or unintended has proven itself a perennial dilemma.
Moving from the household to the city, Barzun discommends any overall ‘ideological’ or religious orientation of intellectual life. The old universities of the West organized themselves around Christianity, an organizing principle Barzun deems to be unavailable in practice today. He firmly refuses its contemporary substitutes, fascism and communism, whose advocates imagine that they “know what learning is for.” He is reduced to hoping that “our intellectual life” will somehow muddle itself together under the auspices of “the great architect,” “History.” Reading him decades later, we can doubt even that wan hope.
Recurring to Barzun’s esteem for A. Lawrence Lowell and his defense of Laski’s presence on the Columbia campus, there is a danger that neither Barzun nor Lowell distinctly foresaw. The Marxist claim to have in its possession the first and only scientific socialism, a science not only of physical nature but of human life tout court, will claim for its devotees a title to rule the university, along with all other social institutions. It is one thing to extend tolerance to a Marxist lecturer, quite another to offer him tenure in a liberal arts institution, with full voting rights respecting educational policies. Such a teacher will not only seek to indoctrinate his students but will incline to either rule or ruin, neither of which will enhance the liberality of the liberal arts. In the years since Barzun wrote and Lowell ruled, progressives and their fellow-travelers have proven susceptible to ignoring that.
Note
- A. Lawrence Lowell: At War with Academic Tradition in America (1934) and What a University President Has Learned (1938). Lowell was a political scientist and a leading Progressive, in these respects similar to his contemporary, Princeton College president Woodrow Wilson. Laski became a Marxist in the 1930s, guest lecturing at Columbia under the auspices of the Institute for Social Research, drawing criticism for his suggestion that the establishment of socialism might require violent revolution.
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