Why Is Teaching So Difficult?

Why Is Teaching So Difficult?

One reason that teaching is so difficult is because it requires the presence of curious and concerned human beings. I find that most people are neither all that curious nor concerned. They seem to be just fine with what they already know (or think they know), and concerned mainly with getting a paycheck, or just through the day. Those are honest limitations, not to be harshly judged. And they are limitations that make teaching difficult. When teaching and learning take place, it is because there is a willingness to take a risk. At the very least, there is a degree of curiosity and concern toward the topic being addressed, the subject, taught. The reason for the concern is that the matter at hand is deemed by those doing the teaching and learning to be crucial to livelihood or to life. Curiosity about such matters becomes really charged then—the mind is standing at attention, ready to pounce, absorb, reject, counter, annihilate, celebrate whatever is put forward.

Teaching is difficult because it asks so much of the participants. Kafka said that you should not open a book unless you are prepared to be devastated. That condition makes reading (and writing) difficult. Might we say the same thing for teaching and learning? Imagine a teacher who says, “do not come into my classroom, into my presence as teacher, unless you are prepared to be devastated!” That would make me pause to consider: “Should I enter this classroom? What is at stake here? What am I risking with such a teacher? Am I willing to risk it?”

“Devastation” is a strong, even violent, word. But let’s consider. Devastation, from Latin devastare, “to  empty (vastus) completely (de-);” “to lay waste completely.” That may sound like an overblown description of what happens in teaching and learning. But reflect on our everyday metaphors for describing the moment of coming to know. We speak of  a “breakthrough,” a”shift,” the ground moving beneath our feet, being “hit like a brick,”  having a “stroke” or “flash” of insight, “eureka!” When I reflect on moments when I really learned something, the term “devastation” does fit. What I had previously “known”—up to that instant of learning—was indeed laid to waste. And I was indeed emptied of ignorance, belief, prejudice, and other forms of counterfeit knowledge. That’s how it felt. As a teacher, I have witnessed such moments in my students. These do seem to be devastating events.

A move like this requires, of course, that we reclaim for the term “teaching” the notion of an activity that bears little resemblance to its less demanding varieties, like “explaining” or “instructing.” Anyone can stand in front of a group of people and unloose a cascade of words. That’s easy. And it’s not so difficult to take someone through the steps of completing, say, a yoga posture, a math equation, a logical syllogism, or a Chopin nocturne. Instruction is valuable, but it’s not teaching.

The Old English term from which our verb “to teach” is derived, tæcan, denotes some actions that we typically associate with these lesser forms of teaching, such as “to show, to declare, to demonstrate, to instruct, to train, to assign, to direct.” But it also connotes actions that are less obvious to the process. These actions can be quite forceful, perhaps even threatening, such as “to persuade, to dismiss, to declare, to warn.” Teaching, as opposed to instructing or reciting “facts” or transmitting information, is  thus potentially coercive. That may seem to count as a difficulty for the learner rather than the teacher. But as someone who is aware of this potential in his teaching, I count it as a perilous matter. It’s the educational Strait of Messina: how do you enable your students to discover their own way past the Scylla of certainty and the Charybids of confusion? It’s very difficult to do.

I recently read George Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). The book constitutes his 2001-2002 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, given over six weeks at Harvard. Reading this book helped to clarify to me what makes teaching so difficult. It also reminded me of the crucial role the teacher plays in society.

Here are some excerpts from Lessons of the Masters.

The pulse of teaching is persuasion. The teacher solicits attention, agreement, and, optimally, collaborative dissent…Persuasion is both positive—”share this skill with me, follow me into this art and practice, read this text”—and negative—”do not believe this, do not expend effort and time on that.” The dynamics are the same: to build a community out of communication, a coherence of shared feelings, passions, refusals. In persuasion, in solicitation, be it of the most abstract, theoretical kind—the demonstration of a mathematical theorem, instruction in musical counterpoint—a process of seduction, willed or accidental, is inescapable. The Master, the pedagogue addresses the intellect, the imagination, the nervous system, the very inward of his listener…

A “master class,” a tutorial, a seminar, but even a lecture can generate an atmosphere saturated with tensions of the heart. The intimacies, the jealousies, the disenchantments will shade into motions of love or of hatred or into complicated mixtures of both…

Strangest of all are Socrates’s pedagogic methods, as reported by Plato…The elenctic technique of question-and-answer does not convey knowledge in an ordinary, didactic sense. It aims to initiate in the respondent a process of uncertainty. Socrates’s teaching is a refusal to teach, which may have been a distant model for Wittgenstein. One might say that whoever grasps Socrates’s intention is made an autodidact, especially in ethics. For Socrates himself professes ignorance…

A negation of knowledge can be interpreted as sagacity. The Socratic position, however, is not one of relativism, let alone scepticism. The distinction between good and evil is urged untiringly. Socrates, unlike certain Sophists acrobats, refuses to put forward what he perfectly well knows to be evil. The whole idea of the soul’s equilibrium, eudaimonia, is founded on a compelling intuition of moral rectitude, of justice towards others and oneself. But can this be taught in any systematic, institutional manner? “Teach at Harvard? It can not be done,” opined Ezra Pound.

Plato’s advocacy of experts in virtue is not, I conjecture, Socratic. For Socrates, true teaching is by example. It is literally, exemplary. The meaning of the just life lies in living it. In ways very difficult to define, a dialectical exchange with Socrates, an experiencing of him (an opaque phrasing) enacts the examined, hence just, life. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus may help when it insists on meaning as “showing,” as “ostensible.” A Socratic moral elicitation is an act of “pointing towards.”…

A good many of the ambushes that Socrates sets for his listeners are, in fact, shallow and refutable. One bridles at the Platonic transcriptions of monosyllabic assent. That, however, is not the point. We learn by watching an athlete perform  or a musician play. In some ideal fashion, a mute Socrates is conceivable; or one who dances his meaning, as would Zarathustra. Here also, the finale of the Tractatus is pertinent.

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