Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 5; September 02

The Heart of the Matter

The Lou Spaventa Column , No 4

Why do we go into teaching as a profession? Are the reasons the same as they are for other professions: prestige and financial reward? Do we carry inside an idealized version of the teacher-student relationship, one which perhaps we nearly had or wish we had had as students? Are we following a family trade? Do we need to teach in the sense that we need an audience for our thoughts? How many of us were influenced by one or more great teachers that we had when we were students?

It seems to me that the answer to the questions above is yes in culturally relative terms. Teaching may hold prestige and even, at some levels, be financially rewarding. Most of the time in the United States, it is not. In Neo-confucian countries like China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, teaching is a respected profession of low financial reward. On the other hand, in the U.S., while public school teachers are frequently criticized for poor student performance, in the University of California system, it is quite common for high-ranking professors to earn well over $100,000 per year.

The psychological dimensions of teaching are such that many teachers report having a mentor or great teacher in their lives. In a recent writing class for future teachers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my students almost to a person, reported that there was a teacher in their lives who influenced them to choose teaching as an occupation. Dan Lortie, in his book Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, claims that many teachers teach for the psychic reward of influencing the lives of their students, albeit that reward is often delayed for years and even decades until the affected student returns to see the teacher and report how the student was influenced by the teacher. Lortie also discusses the "closed door," behind which a teacher creates his own world by his own rules, and thus can have nearly total control of his environment. Behind that door, a teacher can ignore the imprecations of the principal, the policies of the school board or state board of education - at some peril it might be added - and the received wisdom of the teaching profession.

While all of these reasons will be valid for teachers in proportion to the weight given them by a particular culture and a particular familial and personal history, what intrigues me are Confucius's words from so long ago. "To learn and to practice what is learned time and again is pleasure, is it not?" In discussing Chinese philosophy and education with colleagues in the field, the theme of reference to and reverence for the past emerges.

Chinese history posits a time when all was right with the world (meaning China). Rulers ruled benevolently, and people followed their lead. However, it is not in the sense of simply imitating the past that I interpret Confucius's statement. I see we teachers as people who have learned well and were rewarded for doing so. Perhaps this is not true for all individuals, and certainly may not be for the whole academic history of any particular teacher, but I do believe that teachers are people who have found their reward in a certain type of intellectual work. It pleases us to teach because we are using the tools of that intellectual work. In a Piagetian sense, we are functioning so that we might function better. That explains for me why teachers who are dedicated to their work tend to get better as they age. They function at a higher level of competence and this pleases them.

Thus, teaching's reward is intrinsic to its practice, as indeed, I would claim any worthwhile profession's or trade's reward is. I realize the normative claim of the word "worthwhile." We would have to agree on what makes doing something worthwhile in itself. However, let us agree not to quibble over that issue, not when there is a more interesting idea to discuss in regard to teaching.

When Kierkegaard claims that we only believe that there is a teacher - "The object of faith is the reality of the teacher, that the teacher exists" - we must conclude that he assumes us to construct a mental framework wherein there is someone worth listening to for me because that person has something to tell me, to show me, or to demonstrate to me that I believe is of value. In that sense, the teacher is an object of faith, if not a leap of faith. In most classrooms, we assume a knowledge or practice deficit on our own part as we walk in the door. We assume the teacher to have a knowledge sufficiency. This point of view perhaps describes the much maligned "banking method" of education that Paolo Freire criticized thirty some years ago in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (The analogy is somewhat inappropriate in that when one goes to a bank, one makes one's own deposit into an account.)

Freire used the image to suggest a lifeless, imitative classroom, where social, economic and political inequalities were fostered and justified by the deposit of received knowledge into the heads of the students by the teacher. For Freire, the teacher, as representative of an oppressive reality which manipulated rather than educated students, objectified students and so avoided real dialogue, ie, real education. The teacher, a petit bourgeoisie intellectual, needed to transform himself so that he stood at the same level as the students he was to teach. He needed to die from his social class. In Freire's Christian imagery, the teacher needed to make his Easter and be reborn as a proletarian champion.

Now how does this relate to Confucius? What could be farther apart than a fifth century B.C. Chinese sage and a twentieth century Christian Marxist intellectual from Brazil? For me it has to do with faith in practice. While we teachers gain pleasure from using our teaching tools and improving them course after course - not repeating them blindly, we'll assume a best case scenario here - we also believe that what we are doing is transforming in the sense that our practice will influence the lives of our students and our own lives for the better. Whether, as in my own position, the idea of better is related to a more just and democratic life for all people or whether the idea of better is related to a sense of providing life competencies for success, in any case, it is a notion of accomplishing change for the good. Thus, my answer to the question of why we teach goes something like this: We teach because we have done well in educational settings, and we have learned to use the tools of teaching. We use those tools in our classrooms and become better at using them. This pleases us. It is its own reward. Added to this, we have the sense that what we are doing is transforming to our students in a positive manner. Everything else, as they say in the U.S.A., is gravy.

Confucius. The Analects, http://www.confucius.org
Friere, Paulo. (1993) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum, New York.
Lortie, Dan Clement. (1977) Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. University of Chicago