“Would you rather be the sage on the stage or the guide at the side?” a teaching coach asked me in graduate school. Because I was primarily involved in language teaching, the answer seemed obvious. What would be the point of brilliantly staging my native-speaker knowledge of German in front of students? They may find it entertaining, but they would hardly learn anything.
Sean Franzel’s Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture (Northwestern University Press, 2013) reminded me why my teaching philosophy has long been of the guide-at-the-side type. Franzel takes us back to the birth of “staging of the sage” as lecture model in German Romanticism. Intellectuals like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Philipp Moritz, and the Schlegel brothers gave public lectures in a theatrical and captivating manner in response to Kant’s notion that individuals must learn to act autonomously. They sought to inspire audiences to engage in free and original thinking by staging lively philosophical and humanistic inquiries.
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