Teaching Philosophy
When I decided to take teaching seriously as a life profession, it seemed wise to turn back to the beginning – Socrates – who always seems to offer good advice when one is beginning a long journey. And he didn’t disappoint in planting the right seed from the start: the role of the teacher is to be the crafter of souls.
What a heavy burden for the new teacher! In my own experience, the best teachers were the ones that I still to this day can credit for not solely teaching me the right facts – those were indeed important – but those who taught me how to ask the right questions, certainly of myself, but also of what I expected of my peers or of my leaders, of how I understood my place in the world, of what kind of society I wanted to live in. And what I’ve come to realize is that this is what the best teachers do: craft students’ souls by giving them the facilities to do so themselves.
It is not always easy. Good students, of course, know that something as important as intellectual curiosity does not come naturally, that it needs to be worked at. They fight equally a general societal apathy toward much of education (especially that which does not serve a concrete vocational purpose) as well as a common malaise toward the willingness to open oneself up to new ideas and experiences, toward challenging oneself, toward asking the questions that are difficult or uncomfortable to inwardly face. And most certainly, these issues are neither inborn nor easily approached, despite what we might think about the intellectually successful. It is instead the product of being taught how to learn how to learn.
It is this – knowing how to be open to challenges and to question oneself constantly – that we as teachers need to take on as our primary responsibility. Marc Edmundson, in Why Read?, his love letter to teaching great literature, said it better than I ever could:
“Proust and Emerson point toward a span of questions that matter especially for the young, though they count for us all, too. They are questions that should like at the core of a liberal arts education. Who am I? What might I become? What is this world in which I find myself? How might it be changed for the better?” (p. 5).
He’s right: just knowing how to ask the right questions is of utmost importance. And just as being open to challenges is the role of the learner, so too is the role of the teacher to allow the willingness to face the unknown, to look inward to one’s own assumptions and identity and understanding of the world. Good teachers ask as much of themselves as they do of their students.
And this means the both students that we want to be there and the students that we don’t. There always have been apathetic or lazy students; today’s academic environment is no exception. The difficulty, and indeed the teacher’s great achievement, is in being able to inspire the uninspired to ask Edmundson’s questions of themselves. It is to challenge one’s understanding of the world with the understanding that the answers are not going to be easy to find and, when found, they’re often not easy to stomach.
So I have decided to teach. It was not a difficult decision – it encompasses all of the principles in which I believe education serves in a liberal democracy. It fosters citizenship. It provides an enlightened populace. It allows one to examine personal and social life, to deliberate effectively as both an individual and as a member of a community. It leads us out of the wilderness into the mass of society for the betterment of all. Yet we must also remember that the mass of society often needs as much guidance as the uninitiated. Good teachers must remember that they are perpetually in this latter group of the uninitiated in many ways, that some area of their intellectual life always needs at the very least guidance, if not a firm re-evaluation.
And perhaps this is why I find teaching so immeasurably enjoyable. Being able to earn a living in a profession that allows one to constantly learn, to constantly better oneself, to explore one’s understanding of the world while helping students learn about their own – learning together – these are the things that make me excited about walking into the classroom every day. And it is enjoyable. It’s okay to have fun in class. It’s okay to smile, to laugh, to joke, to bring joy to each other’s lives. Often times I think that teachers approach the classroom as a humorless, airtight capsule where knowledge is hermetically sealed, but I think that this is a mistake. The classroom and life are a complimentary relationship – this is something I learned in my years facilitating service learning projects – and one that does not check the so-called “outside” world at the academic door, as if you could ever really distinguish the two anyway.
So how do I attempt to do this? By believing in and enacting the fundamentals of a liberal education in my courses. In both the university and non-university institution alike, the vocational education has immense value, of course, and learning toward vocation seems to be much more easily defended these days given the present injustice of college tuitions. But given the purpose of education (and especially for those of us that are critical cultural theorists) in a liberal democracy, we owe it to our students to teach them how to become critical subjects, not just capable workers or competent voters. We need to teach them to critically examine communication in order that they can critically examine culture. We need to teach them to question their own values, for these values have often been articulated in such a way in our culture that they work against the very basis of not only a healthy democracy but of fundamental human rights. We need to teach them that there are many decisions to be made in one’s life choices, that there are good lives instead of a good life. We need to remind them of the reason that they are here, a reason that is all too often neglected in our culture’s public dialogue: Education exists for the betterment of the human soul. It is Socrates’ last question, and it is the right one.