Teaching as an Art and Science - Essay Example

Running head: Teaching as an art and science Teaching as an art and science [The of the appears here] [The of institution appears here] Introduction The best-known kind of teaching and the most highly organized -- although not the most important -- is done in schools, in colleges, in universities, and in technical institutions. Everyone owes something to professional teachers. Let us start, then, by looking at them. What kind of people are they, and how do they work The teacher has a very peculiar job. It is easy in some ways, and in others it is difficult. The easiest part about it is the spacious routine. There are not many teachers who, like business-men and professional people, are on duty forty-eight or fifty weeks a year every year, and there are still fewer who teach from nine to five every day, five or six days a week. Most schools and colleges run for only nine months in the year altogether, and there is seldom any necessity for a teacher to be on call every hour of the working day. Of course there is a great deal to be done outside teaching hours. Some of it is routine -- preparing examinations, reading papers, interviewing pupils. Some of it is research and preparation. But much of this kind of work can be done in one's own time, at one's own home, or in the quiet of a book-room. The great advantage of this is that comparatively few teachers are tied to the desk, chained to the telephone which begins to ring at nine on Monday morning and is still chattering at noon on Saturday, or limited for vacations to a fortnight in July among the millions of exhausted factory-workers (Highet, 1950). Teaching is an art form. The educator is an artist and, as artist, aims at creating an experience of enduring meaning. Varieties of techniques are developed to generate this extraordinary experience. Success is measured in the degree that students and educator have this experience. Sharing in or participating in the development and enhancement of knowledge is one of the richest of aesthetic moments. The rare teacher who understands and creates the conditions for such moments becomes a seminal image in student memories. Students who participate in a magic moment of learning become and remain a source of delight and pride for the artist - they become, with reverence, his or her students. But, if education does have an aesthetic dimension, what is it and what is its connection with the ethical constituents of teaching and learning The answer is found when learning is conceived of as a shared experience given form by a most special aim or end. The point at which the tensions of struggling individual selves, the distinctions of rank and function flower into a unity of shared meanings that enhance the experience of teacher and student constitutes the end, the target, the bull's eye of the academic process. An understanding of what shared meanings enhance our lives indicates how they are to be shared, that is, what the ethics of teaching are (Hook, Kurtz, & Todorovich, 1977). Teacher and learner strive to know how the social, biological, and physical processes that constitute existence can be unified in ways that render our lives more wondrous, more humane, more gratifying - that is, more wise. This communal process, the communal development of wisdom itself, becomes the criterion, the aesthetic measure of the quality of teaching and learning. To repeat, the aesthetic objective - the sharing of meanings in ways that promote mutual growth - serves as the criterion to evaluate the worth of the means employed to teach. Are the means employed conducive to developing habits that constitute intelligence and confidence in judgment Do the means render one more sensitive to the beauty of learning from and teaching others Do we gain a growing appreciation of what actions establish connections with the social, biological, and physical world that sustain becoming The "ethics of teaching" is quite clearly, then, the effort to understand and implement those actions that stimulate individual growth through cooperative effort. Teaching is the value-laden moral enterprise par excellence. What does the teacher teach if he or she behaves like a tyrant, cruelly puts down "inadequate" answers, demands adherence to a "party line," or encourages destructive, vindictive competition In such a situation the students become victims to be used and abused. Given the criterion of enhancement of intellectual and social capacities through conjoint efforts, such behavior is clearly unethical, because it destroys the students' and teacher's opportunities to become more than they are (Hook, Kurtz, & Todorovich, 1977). As noted, teaching so defined is not a science; it is an art, for it aims at producing shared qualities of action. Teaching defined as an art has an objective, and hence contains an intrinsic criterion of value, an intrinsic ethic. The implications of this conception of the ethics of teaching are far reaching. The educator, the teacher, the artist is the moral philosopher - one who seeks to criticize reflectively and thereby transform values. To argue that such a function lies outside the proper domain of the educator is to suggest that the most important of human actions - the exercise of informed choice - is not a proper object of inquiry. If a major purpose of education is to promote intelligent, informed, independent judgment, placing taboos on the study of various techniques of evaluating preferences is palpably unethical. Is prejudicial "judgment" in matters racial, political, interpersonal, religious, moral, as worthy a mode of decision-making as inquiry into the conditions and consequences of acting on a preference Education is so value-laden that the question is rhetorical. The educator is decidedly not a value legislator, but it is clearly his or her duty to instruct in the art of rendering informed judgments (Hook, Kurtz, & Todorovich, 1977). Some of the most important men in history have been teachers. Many of the biggest advances in civilization have been the chief work, not of politicians or inventors, not even of artists, but of teachers. Before we go on to look at teaching in modern everyday life -- as it is done by editors and doctors, foremen and fathers, and many other types -- let us see who the chief teachers of our world have been, and how they worked. In Western civilization there are two lines of teachers from whom all modern teaching stems: the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets. Outside the Jewish community the influence of the Greeks is far wider, stronger, and more varied -- with the exception of the teaching of Jesus himself. The Hebrew prophets knew they were uttering the voice of God. We admire both, but we are apt to think that while a group of men who are in touch with God can change the world by a rare and miraculous intervention, it needs the steady work of reason to keep the place going and to train the young. After Socrates, the intellectuals preferred to call themselves "philosophers," which means "lovers of wisdom for its own sake.") We are still talking about many of the ideas the sophists worked out: for instance, it was they who first discussed whether there were any absolute standards of morality, or merely artificial conventions; whether justice is a constant, or simply means the will of the ruling class; and so forth. As thinkers -- particularly as destructive critics -- they were dazzling. As teachers, they were superficial. They were exclusively lecturers. All that we hear of them shows them as phenomenally graceful and subtle talkers, usually to fairly large audiences. In that they are the direct ancestors of the modern "authority" who tours the large cities giving a carefully prepared speech in which his own personal power or charm is combined with well-spaced jokes and memorable epigrams, the whole varying very little from one repetition to another. Like him, they were highly paid and widely advertised and welcomed by a reception committee and entertained by ambitious hosts. But unlike him, some of them professed to be authorities on everything. They said they could lecture on any subject under the sun. Often they were challenged to speak on odd and difficult topics, and accepted the dare. However, they did not usually pretend to know more facts than others, but rather to be able to think and talk better. In that, perhaps, they are the ancestors of the modern journalists who have the knack of turning out a bright and interesting article on any new subject, without using special or expert information. The perfect example of the modern sophist would be Bernard Shaw, if he had only spoken his inimitable prefaces with his inimitable charm instead of printing them. Like him, the sophists dazzled everyone without convincing anyone of anything positive. Like him, they argued unsystematically and unfairly, but painted over the gaps in their reasoning with glossy rhetoric. Like him, they had few constructive ideas, and won most applause by taking traditional notions and showing they were based on convention rather than logic. Like him, they demonstrated that almost anything could be proved by a fast talker -- sometimes, as a stunt, they made a powerful speech on one side of a question in the morning and an equally powerful speech on the opposite side in the afternoon. And like him, they never allowed anyone else to get a word in edgewise (Highet, 1950). The results of the sophists' method of teaching were both good and bad. They were a strong disruptive force in civilization, for they helped to blow up many sound traditional values, and often blinded their pupils by the temporary brilliance of the explosion, leaving them no help in rebuilding their individual and social lives. Yet they taught the Greeks what no other Mediterranean nation ever learnt, that thought alone is one of the strongest forces in human life. The respect for the thinker which they created has lasted, off and on, until this very day (Highet, 1950). Teaching, like farming and healing, is a cooperative art which helps nature do what it can do itself -- though not as well without it. We have all learned many things without the aid of a teacher. Some exceptional individuals have acquired wide learning and deep insight with very little formal schooling. But for most of us the process of learning is made more certain and less painful when we have a teacher's help. His methodical guidance makes our learning -- and it is still ours -- easier and more effective. One basic aspect of teaching is not found in the other two cooperative arts that work with organic nature. Teaching always involves a relation between the mind of one person and the mind of another. The teacher is not merely a talking book, an animated phonograph record, broadcast to an unknown audience. He enters into a dialogue with his student. This dialogue goes far beyond mere "talk," for a good deal of what is taught is transmitted almost unconsciously in the personal interchange between teacher and student. We might get by with encyclopaedias, phonograph records, and TV broadcasts if it were not for this intangible element, which is present in every good teacher-student relation. This is a two-way relation. The teacher gives, and the student receives aid and guidance. The student is a "disciple"; that is, he accepts and follows the discipline prescribed by the teacher for the development of his mind. This is not a passive submission to arbitrary authority. It is an active appropriation by the student of the directions indicated by the teacher. The good student uses his teacher just as a child uses his parents, as a means of attaining maturity and independence. The recalcitrant student, who spurns a teacher's help, is wasteful and self-destructive. http://radicalacademy.com/adlerteaching2.htm Reference: Gilbert Highet, 1950. The Art of Teaching. Alfred A. Knopf, 1950 http://radicalacademy.com/adlerteaching2.htm Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, Miro Todorovich, 1977. The Ethics of Teaching and Scientific, Prometheus Books. Read More