There is not much middle ground when it comes to teachers. They are either good, in which case they are among the most important people in the world, or they are not good, in which case at best they represent a missed opportunity — which is a serious matter — and at worst they are positively harmful. Teachers are harmful when they put students off a subject of study, thus depriving them of a chance at the fullness of what it could offer. To put the matter harshly, the crime involved is not far removed from poking out someone’s eyes with a sharp stick. Perhaps indeed intellectual blindness is worse than physical blindness, which makes one wonder what should be the fate of the teacher who turns students against any area of knowledge or inquiry.
Another and even worse kind of harmful teacher are those who undermine their students’ confidence, making them lose self-belief, humiliating and ridiculing them, picking one out and turning other students against him or her, poisoning their students’ outlook either in a general or a particular respect. What should be the fate of someone who uses the role of teacher to inflict such injuries?
Good teachers do exactly the opposite of these things, and as a result inspire, guide, and give their students a broader sense of life’s possibilities. Aristotle thought that teachers are more important than parents because whereas parents (merely, he said) give their children life, teachers give them the art of living. This is partly right, and the part in question is larger if a child is thereby given a chance to escape prejudices and idiosyncrasies of outlook that might happen to form the conceptual framework of his or her origins. There is of course much in the way of knowledge and skill that has to be taught, and good teachers ensure that the majority of students under their care — more precisely, all capable of doing so — acquire both. But there is even more in the educational process that cannot be taught, only caught; and the chief of what a good teacher can achieve in this respect is to give students the desire to know more, understand more, achieve greater insight. In short: The good teacher inspires.
If one were to analyze what goes into being an inspiring teacher in this sense, the list would include enthusiasm, charisma, a capacity to clarify and make sense, humor, kindness, and a genuine interest in students’ progress. Much of this is a matter of natural capacity; which implies that teachers are born, not made; and this in turn explains why teaching is so often described as a vocation.
Consider each characteristic. Enthusiasm is important because it is attractive and catching. Enthusiastic teachers want their students to be enthusiastic about their subjects, and will succeed with some of them. Charisma does not invariably accompany enthusiasm, but can be a byproduct of it. A charismatic teacher is a Pied Piper for the subject taught, and can draw students to it even if solely from the desire of emulation. Teachers who know their subject thoroughly, and have a knack for making it clear and putting it well into context, are invaluable: They are illuminators. Put all three characteristics together and you have a teacher who can completely change students’ lives for the better.
Humor, kindness, and genuine interest need no explanation. Some new teachers worry about manifesting these qualities too overtly, not wishing to appear weak to students, who are merciless with anyone unable to keep discipline. One result can eventually be the substitution of bullying for authority — the worst kind of bullying being the undermining of confidence mentioned above — but there is no inconsistency in being both kind and firm, humorous although not prepared to tolerate messing about, and interested without being partial. It is a matter of operational tact and good timing.
Almost everyone can point to a teacher (if they are lucky, to more than one) who was inspirational and helpful. I had several at school and university who made me interested in their interests, who were encouraging and enabling, who were on my side. It is an amazingly potentiating thing to have someone believe in you; whether they are right to do so because they recognize a genuine capacity in you to succeed, or whether their attitude is itself the prompt to acquire such a capacity, is neither here nor there. It has the right outcome either way.
Good teachers are those who remember being a student.
It is a pleasure to name names. Jim Marshall and Tony Nuttall taught me English literature, Peter Williams taught me Latin, Timothy Sprigge, Bernard Harrison, A.J. Ayer, and Peter Strawson taught me philosophy. They were each good teachers because they combined the above-listed characteristics in individually various proportions, the net effect being to make it possible for me to teach myself. And that, paradoxical as it may seem, is the best outcome of good teaching. Independence of endeavor, and soon therefore of mind, should be one of the fundamental aims of education.
Teachers know that the best way to learn is to teach: docendo disco as the tag has it. And obviously enough: The better one’s students, the more one learns. The chief of several reasons for this is that the effort to help others understand requires a good grip of the topic on the teacher’s part. Students’ questions and doubts compel one to think and rethink, often prompting one to see things that had not been noticed before. For this reason it is never boring to teach the same subject repeatedly. Like rereading the classics, or revisiting familiar places, new insights always offer themselves, and better ways of doing things with them.
Good teachers are those who remember being a student. They hear themselves as their students hear them. They know which aspects of their subject might present a difficulty, which require to be grasped before which, and what their best students will be keen to know, and why. A sense of how the constituents of a subject hang together, so that one knows the best order of their presentation, is something that being on the receiving end of both good and bad teaching helps one to acquire.
It is a significant fact that after the First World War a number of the 20th century’s leading philosophers turned to education, either in theory or practice, in the belief that the future security of humankind depended on an intelligent understanding of its accumulating knowledge (especially science) together with cultivation of the ability to think. Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper all taught in schools; Russell founded one. It is easy to think that education fails to deliver its Eutopian promise — namely, a world of reflective and considerate people living cooperatively — but the real point to consider is what the world would be like without it.
It is well said that ignorance is far more expensive than education. This is an observation about the general effect of education in society, but there is also the unquantifiable good that education offers individuals — for people are far more than the jobs they do, but are also (and perhaps more importantly) voters, neighbors, lovers, parents, friends, travelers, and more, and for all the different parts they play they require to be informed, to think, to choose and to act. Education is for all aspects of life, not just one such.
If education is this important, and if education starts with teachers, then teachers are this important too. True, we can learn from others, from nature, from books — all these things might teach us more, and more deeply. But at crucial junctures education needs teachers; the better they are, the more fruitful will be all the other forms of education that life affords.
A.C. Grayling is a professor of philosophy at and master of the New College of the Humanities, London. This essay is excerpted from The Challenge of Things, out this month from Bloomsbury.
