CHAPTER FOUR Teachers, Dead or Alive We can be instructed by listening to a lecture as well as through reading a book. That is what brings us to the consideration now of books and teachers, to complete our understanding of reading as learning.
Teaching, as we have seen, is the process whereby one man learns from another through communication. Instruction is thus distinguished from discovery, which is the process whereby a man learns something by himself, through observing and thinking about the world, and not by receiving communicatioin from other men. It is true, of course, that these two kinds of learning are intimately and intricately fused in the actual education of any man. Each may help the other. But the point remains that we can always tell, if we take the pains to do so, whether we learned something we know from someone else or whether we found it out for ourselves.
We may even be able to tell whether we have learned it from a book or from a teacher. But, by the meaning of the word "teaching," the book which taught us something can be called a "teacher." We must distinguish, therefore, between writing teachers and speaking teachers, teachers we learn from by reading and teachers we learn from by listening.
For convenience of reference, I shall call the speaking teacher a "live teacher." He is a human being with whom we have some personal contact. And I shall call books "dead teachers." Please note that I do not mean to say that the author of the book is dead. In fact, he may be the very alive teacher who not only lectures at us but makes read a textbook he has written.
Whether or not the author is dead, the book is a dead thing. I cannot talk back to us, or answer questions. It does not grow and change its mind. It is a communication, but we cannot converse with it, in the sense in which we may succeed, once in a while, in communicating something to our living teachers. The rare cases in which we have been able to converse profitably with the author of a book we have read may make us realize our deprivation when the author is dead or at least unavailble for conversation.
What is the role of the live teacher in our education? A live teacher may help us to acquire certain skills: may teach us how to cut pin wheels in kindergarten, how to form and recognize letters in the early grades, or how to spell and pronounce, how to do sums and long division, how to cook, sew, and do carpentry. A live teacher may assist us to develop any art, even the arts of learning itself, such s the art of experimental research or the art of reading.
In giving such aid, more than communication is usually involved. The live teacher not only tells us what to do, but is particulalry useful in showing us how and, even more directly, in helping us to go through the motions. On these latter counts, there is no question that a live teacher can be more helpful than a dead one. The most successful how-to-book cannot take you by the hand or say at the right moment, "stop doing it that way. Do it this way."
Now, one thing is immediately clear. With respect to all the knowledge we gain by discovery, a live teacher can perform only on function. He obviously cannot teach us that knowledge, for then we could not gain it by discovery. He can only teach us the art of discovery, that is, tell us how to do research, how to observe and think in the process of finding things out. He may, in addition, help us to become expert in the motions. In general this is the province of a book like Dewey's How We Think and of those who have tried to help students practice according to its rules.
Since we are primarily concerned with reading—and with the other kind of learning, through instruction—we can limit our discussion to the role of the teacher as one who communicates knowledge or help us to learn from communication. And, for the time being, let us even limit ourselves to considering the live teacher as a source of knowledge, and not as a preceptor who help us learn how to do something.
Considered as a source of knowledge, the live teacher either competes with or co-operate with dead teachers, that is, with books. By competition I mean the way in which many live teachers tell their students by lectures what the students could learn by reading the books the lecturer himself digested. Long before the magazine existed, live teachers earned their living by being "readers' digests." By co-operation I mean the way in which the live teacher somehow divides the function of teaching between himself and available books: some things he tells the student, usually boiling down what he himself has read, and some things he expects the student to learn by reading.
If these were the only functions a live teacher performed with respect to the communication of knowledge, it would follow that anything which can be learned in school can be learned outsied of school and without live teachers. It might take a little more trouble to read for yourself than to have books digested for you. You might have to read more books, if books were your only teachers. But to whatever extent, it is true that the live teacher has no knowledge to communicate except what he himself learned by reading, you can learn it directly from books yourself. You can learn it as well if you can read as well.
I suspect, moreover, that if what you seek is understanding rather information, reading will take you further. Most of us are guilty of the vice of passive reading, of course; but most of people are even more likely to be passive in listening to a lecture. A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.
Note taking is usually not an active assimilation of what is to be understood, but an almost automatic record of what was said. The habit of doing it becomes a more pervasive substitute for learning and thinking as one spends more years in educational institutions. It is worst in the professional schools, such as law and medicine, and the graduate school. Someone said you can tell the difference between graduate and undergraduate students in this way. If you walk into a classrom and say "Good Morning," and the students reply, they are undergraduates. If they write it down, they are graduate students.
There are two other functions a live teacher performs, by which he related to books. One is repetition. We have all taken courses in school in which the teacher said in class the very same things we were assigned to read in a textbook written by him or one of his colleagues. I have been guilty of teaching that way myself. I remember the first course I ever taught. It was elementary psychology. A textbook was assigned. The examination which the department set for all the sections of this course indicate that the student need only learn what the textbook said. My only function as a living teacher was to help the textbook do its work. In part, I asked questions of the sort that might be asked on an examination. In part, I lectured, repeating the book chapter by chapter, in words not very different from those the author used.
Occasionally I may have tried to explain a point, but if the student had done a job of reading for understanding, he could have understood the point by himself. If he could not read that way, he probably could not listen to my explanation in an understanding way either.
Most of the students were taking the course for credit, not merit. Since the examination did not measure understanding but information, they probably regarded my explanations as a waste of their time—sheer exhibitionism on my part. Why they continued to come to class, I do not know. If they had spent as much time reading the textbook as the sport page, and with the same diligence for details of information, they could have passed the examination without being bored by me.
The function which remains to be discussed is difficult to name. Perhaps I can call it "original communication." I am thinking of the living instructor who knows something which cannot be found in books anywhere. It must be something which he has himself discovered and has not yet made available for readers. This happens rarely. It happens today most frequently in the fields of scholarship or scientific research. Every now and then the graduate school is graded by a course of lectures which constitute an original communication. If you are not fortunate enough to hear the lectures, you usually console yourself by saying that they will probably appear in book form shortly.
The printing of books has now become such routine and common affair that it is not likely any more that original communications must be heard or lost. Before Caxton, however, the living teacher probably performed this function more frequently. That was why students traveled all over medieval Europe to hear a famous lecturer. If one goes back far enough in the history of European lerning, one comes to the early time before knowledge had been funded, before there was a tradition of learning whoch one generation received from its predecessor and passed on the next. Then, of course, the teacher was primarily a man of knowledge and communicator secondarily. I mean he had first to get knowledge by discovering it himself, before he could teach it to anyone else.
The present day situation is at the other extreme. The living teacher today is primarily a man of learning, rather than a discoverer. He is one who has learned most of what he knows from other teachers, alive or dead. Let us consider the average teacher today as one who no original communication to make. In relation to dead teachers, therefore, he must be either a repeater or digester. In either case, his students could learn everything he knows by reading the books he has read.
With respect to the communication of knowledge, the only justification for the living teacher, then, is a practical one. The flesh being weak, it takes the easier course. The paraphernalia of lectures, assignments, and examinations maybe a surer and more efficient way of getting a certain amount of information, and even a little understanding, into the rising generatioins's heads. Even if we had trained them how to read well, we might not be able to trust them to keep at the hard work of reading in order to learn.
The self-educated man is as rare as the self-made man. Most men do not become genuinely learned or amass large fortunes through their own efforts. The existence of such men, however, shows it can be done. theirrarity indicates the exceptional qualities of character—the stamina and self-discipline, the patience and perseverance—which are required. In knowledge as in wealth, most of us have to be spoon-fed to the little we possess.
These facts, and their practical consequences for institutional education, do not alter the main point, however. What is true of the average teacher is equally true of all textbooks, manuals, and syllabi. These, too, are nothing but repetitions, compiliations, and condensations of what can be found in other books, often other books of the same sort.
There is one exception, however, and that makes the point. Let us call those living teachers who perform the function of original communication the primary teachers. There are few in every generation, though most are primary and secondary teachers who are alive now, so among dead teachers we can make the same distinction. There are primary and secondary books.
The primary books are those which contain original communications. They need not be original in entirety, of course. On the contraray, complete originality is both iinpossible and misleading. It is impossible except at the hypothetical beginning of our cultural tradition. It is misleading because no one should try to discover for himself what he can be taught by others. The best sort of originality is obviously that which adds something to the fund of knowledge made available by the tradition of learning. Ignorance or neglect of the tradition is likely to result in a false or shllow originality.
The great books in all fields of learning are, in some good sense of the word, "original" communications. These are the books which are usually called "classics," but that word has for most peopoe a wrong and forbidding connotation—wrong in the sense of referring to antiquity, and forbidding in the sense of sounding unreadable. Great books are being written today and were written yesterday, far from being unreadable, the great books are the most readable and those which most deserve to be read.
What I have said so far may not help you to pick out the great books from all others on the shelves. I fact, I shall postpone stating the criteria which betoken a great book—criteria which also help you tell good books from bad—until much later (in Chapter Sixteen, to be precise). I might seem logical to tell a person what to read before telling him how, but I think it is wiser pedagogy to explain the requirements of reading first. Unless one is able to read carefully and critically, the criteria for judging books, however sound they may be in themselves, are likely to become in use just arbitrary rules of thumb. Only after you have read some great books competently will you have an intimate grasp of the standards by which other books can be judged as great or good. If you are impatient to know the titles of the books which most competent readers have agreed upon as great, you can turn now to the Appendix in which they are listed; but I would advise waiting until you have read the discussion of their characteristics and contents in Chapter Sixteen.
There is, however, one thing I can say about the great books here. This may explain why they are generally readable, even if it does not explain why they should be generally read. They are like popularizations in that most of them are written for ordinary men and not for pedants of scholars. They are like textbooks in that they are intended for beginners and not for specialists or advanced students. You can see why that must be so. To the extext that they are original, they have to address themselves to an audience which starts from scratch. There is no prerequisite for reading a great book except another great book in the tradition of learning, by which the later teacher may have himself been taught.
Unlike textbooks and popularizations, the great books assume an audience of readers who are thoroughly competent to read. That is one of their major distinctions, and probably why they are so little read today. They are not only original communcations, rather than digests or repetitions, but unlike the latter they do not go in for spoon-feeding. they say: "Here is knowledge worth having. Come and get it."
The proliferation of textbooks and lecture courses in our educational system today is the surest sign of our declining literacy. Truer than the quip that those who can't teach, teach teachers, is the insight that teachers who cannot help their students read the great books write textbooks for them, or at least use those their colleagues have written. A textbook or manual might almost be defined as a pedagogical invention for geting "something" into the heads of those who cannot read well enough to learn more actively. An ordinary classroom lecture is a similar device. When teachers no longer know how to perform the function of reading books with their students, they are forced to lecture at them instead.
Textbooks and popularizations of all sorts are written for people who do not know how to read or can read only for information. As dead teachers, they are like the live secondary teachers who wrote them. Alive or dead, the secondary teacher tries to impart knowledge without requiring too much or too skillful activity on the part of learner. Theirs is an art of teaching which demands the least art of being taught in the students. They stuff the mind rather than enlighten it. The measure of their success is how much the sponge will absorb.
Our ultimate goal is understanding rather than information, though information is a necessary steppingstone. Hence we must go to the primary teachers, for they have understanding to give. Can there be any question that the primary teachers are better sources of learning than the secondary ones? Is there are any doubt that the effort they demand of us leads to the vital cultivation of our minds? We can avoid effort in learning , but we cannot avoid the results of effortless learning.—the assorted vagaries we collect by letting secondary teachers indoctrinate us.
If, in the same college, two men were lecturing, one a man who had discovered some truth, the other a man who was repeating secondhand what he had heard reported of the first man's work, which would you rather go to hear? Yes, even supposing that the repeater promised to make it a little simpler by talking down to your level, would you not suspect that the secondhand stuff lacked something in quality or quantity? If you paid the greater price in effort, you would be rewarded by better goods.
It happens to be the case, of course, that the most of the primary teachers dead—the men are dead, and the books they have left us are dead teachers—whereas most of the living teachers are secondary. But suppose that we could resuscitate the primary teachers of all times. Suppose there were a college or university in which the faculty was thus composed. Herdotus and Thucydides taught the history of Greece, and Gibbon lectured on the fall of Rome. Plato and St. Thomas gave a course in metaphysics together; Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill discussed the logic of science; Aristotle, Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant shared the platform on moral problems; Machivelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke talked about politics.
You could take a series of courses in mathematics form Euclid, Descartes, Riemann, and Cantor, with Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead added at the end. You could listen to St. Augustine and William James talk about the nature of man and the human mind, with hperhaps Jacques Maritain to comment on the lectures. Harvey discussed the circulation of the blood, and Galen, Claude Bernard, and Haldane taught general physiology.
Lectures on physics enlisted the talent of Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Maxwell, Planck and Einstein. Boyle, dalton, Lavosier, and Pasteur taught chemistry. Darwin and Mendel gave the main lectures on evolution and genetics, with supporting talks by Bateson and T.H. Morgan.
Aristotle, sir Philip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Shelley discussed the nature of poetry and the principle of literary criticism, with T.S. Eliot thrown in to boot. In economics, the lecturers were by Adam smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Marshall. Boas discussed the human race and its races, Thorsetin Veblen and John Dewey, the economic and political problems of American democracy, and Lenin lectured on communism.
Etienne Gilson analyzed the history of philosophy, and Poincaré and Duhem, the history of science. There might even be lectures on art by Leonardo da Vinci, and a lecture on Leonardo by Freud. Hobbes and Locke might discuss Ogden and Richards, Korzybski and Stuart Chase. A much larger faculty than this is imaginable, but this will suffice.
Would anyone want to go to any other university, if he could get into this one? There need be no limitation of numbers. The price of admission—the only entrance requirement—is the ability and willingness to read. This school exists for everybody who is willing and able to learn from first-rate teachers, they theybe dead in the sense of not joining us out of our lethargy by their living presence. They are not dead in any other sense. If contemporary America dismisses them as dead, then, as a well-known writer recently said, we are repeating the folly of the ancient Athenians who supposed that Socrates died when he drank hemlock.
The great books can be read in or out of school. If they are read in school, in classes under the supervision of live teachers, the latter must properly subordinate themselves to the dead ones. We can learn only from our intellectual betters. The great books are better than most living teachers as well as their students.
The secondary teacher is simply a better student, and he should regard himself as learning. from the masters along with his younger charges. He should not act as if he were the primary teacher, using a great books as if it were just another textbook of the sort one of his colleagues might write. He should not masquerade as one who knows and can teach by virtue of his original disvoceries, if he is only one who has learned through being taught. The primary sources of his own knowledge should be the primary sources of learning for his students, and such a teacher functions honestly only if he does not aggrandize himself by coming between the great books and their young readers. He should not "come between" as nonconductor, but he should come between as a mediator—as one who helps the less competent make more effective contacts with the best minds.
All this is not news, or, at least, it should not be. For many centuries, education was regarded as the elevation of a mind by its betters. If we are honest, most of us living teachers should be willing to admit that, apart from the advantages which age bestows, we are not much better than our students in intellectual caliber or attainment. If elevation is to take place, better minds than ours will have to do the teaching. That is why, for many centuries, education was thought to be produced by contact with the great minds of past and presents.
There is only one fly in the ointment. We, the teachers, must know how to read for understanding. Our students must know how. Anyone, in school or out, must know how, if the formula is to work.
But, you may say, it isn't as simple as that. These great books are too difficult for most of us, in school or out. That is why we are forced to get our education from secondary teachers, from classroom lectures, textbooks, popularizations, which repeat and digest for us what would otherwise forever remain a closed book. Even though our aim be understanding, not infomation, we must be satisfied with a less rich diet. We suffer incurable limitations. The masters are too far above us. It is certainly better to gather a few crumbs which dropped from the table than to starve in futile adoration of the feast we cannot reach.
This I deny. For one thing, the less rich diet is likely not to be genuinely nourishing at all, if it is predigested food which can be passively acquired and only temporarily retained rather than actively assimilated. For another, as Professor Morris Cohen once told a class of his, the pearls which are dropped before real swine are likely to be imitation.
I am not denying that the great books are likely to require more arduous and diligent effort than the digests. I am only saying that the latter cannot be substituted for the former, because you cannot get the same thing out of them. They may be all right fi all you want is some kind of information, but not if it is enlightment you seek. There is no royal road. The path of true learning is strewn with rocks, not roses. Anyone who insists upon taking the easierway ends up in fool's paradise—a bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, a sophomore all his life.
At the same time, I am saying that the great books can be read by every man. The help he needs from secondary teachers does not consist of the get-learning-quick substitutes. It consists of help in learning how to read, and more than that when possible, help actually in the course of reading the great books.
Let me argue a bit further the point the great books are the most readable. In some cases, of course, they are difficult to read. They require the greatest ability to read. Their art of teaching demands a corresponding and proportionate art of being taught. But, at the same time, the great books are the most competent to instruct us about the subject matters with which they deal. If we had the skill necessary to read them well, we would find them the easiest, because the most facile and adequate, way to master the subject matters in question.
There is something of a paradox here. It is due to the fact that two different kinds of mastery are involved. There is, on the one hand, the author's mastery of his subject matter; on the other, there is our need to master the book he has written. These books are recognized as great because of their mastery, and we rate ourselves as readers according to the degree of our ability to master these books.
If our aim in readingis to gain knowledge and insight, then the great books are the most readable, both for the less and for the more competent, because they are the most instructive. Obviously I do not mean "most readable" in the sense of "with the least effort"—even for the expert reader. I mean that these books reward every degree of effort and ability to the maximum. I may be harder to dig for gold than for potatoes, but each unit of successful effort is more amply repaid.
The relation between the great books and their subject matters, which makes them what they are, cannot be changed. That is an objective and unalterable fact. But the relation between the original competence of the beginning reader and books which most deserve to be read can be altered. The reader can be mase more competent, through guidance and practice. To the extent that this happens, he is not only more able to read the great books, but, as a consequence, comes nearer and nearer to understanding the subject matter as the masters have understood it. Such mastery is the ideal of education. It is the obligation of secondary teachers to facilitate the approach to this ideal.
In writing this book I am a secondary teacher. My aim is to help and mediate. I am not going to read any books for you to save you trouble of reading them yourself. this book has only two functions to perform: to interest you in the profit of reading and to assist you in cultivating the art.
If you are no longer in school, you may be forced to use the services of a dead teacher pf the art, such as this book. And no how-to-do book can ever be as helpful, in as many ways, as a good living guide. It may be just a little harder to develop skill when you have to practive according to the rules you find in a book, without being stopped, corrected, and shown how. But it certainly can be done. Too many men have done it to leave the possibility in doubt. It is never too late to begin, but we all have reason to be vexed with a school system which failed to give us a good start early in life.
The failure of schools, and their responsibility, belong to the next chapter. Let me end this one by calling your attention to two things. The first is that you have learned something about the rules of reading. In earlier chapters you saw the importance of picking out important words and sentences and interpreting them. In the course of this chapter you have followed an argument about the readability of the great gooks and their role in education. Discovering and following an author's argument is another step in reading. I shall discuss the rule for doing so more fully later.
The second point is that we have now pretty well defined the purpose of this book. It has taken many pages to do that, but I think you can see why it would have been unintelligible if I had stated it in the first paragraph. I could have said: "This book is intended to help you develop the art of reading for understanding, not information; therefore, it aims to encourage and assist you in reading the great books." But I do not think you would have known what I meant.
Now you do, even though you may still have some reservations about the profit or significance of the enterprise. You may think there are many books, other than the great ones, which are worth reading. I agree, of couse. But you must admit in turn that the better the book, the more it is worth reading. Furthermore, if you learn how to read the great books, you will have no difficulty in reading other books, or for that matter anything else. You can use your skill to go after easier game. May I remind you, however, that the sportsman doesn't hunt lame ducks?
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