Teachers, Students, and Selfishness in the Seventies: First of Two Parts

When Milton wrote that the desire for fame is the “last infirmity of noble mind,” he was recognizing selfish pride as a sin so basic to humanity that it is generally the subtlest stronghold of the lower nature. Teachers of all types—grade school, Sunday school, high school, college, and preachers too—are often very public-spirited people, eager to help others and eager to share their insights; but this very eagerness contains the seed of pride that will bloom into intellectual tyranny and unnecessary authoritarianism unless it is very manfully and repeatedly put under. Teaching a class or preaching to a congregation confers power, and power corrupts. One cannot be too careful about the insidious presence of selfishness; and I believe that the decade into which we have recently entered will present special challenges because of the kind of students we will confront.

In Stress and Campus Response: Current Issues in Higher Education 1968, Richard Axen of San Francisco State maintains that if you scratch the surface of the collective faculty in American colleges “you reach a substratum of authoritarianism only slightly disguised in moments of noncrises by a thin patina of liberalism and intellectualism.” Today’s outspoken students are of course continually challenging “cherished faculty prerogatives,” and in response, “authoritarian tendencies are blooming.” Axen urges that we expend our energies in correcting the conditions that have fostered legitimate student grievances rather than in squelching dissent. “A reformed higher education,” he rightly points out, “will require a radically changed faculty role—a role more open, less status-bound, less authoritative, and less self-centered.” But he admits that so far the collective American faculty shuns this redefinition of role “like the plague” (pp. 110, 111).

What Axen says of college and university faculties as a whole is even more true of faculties in Christian colleges, Bible schools, and grade schools, not to mention Sunday schools and the teaching ministry of the evangelical clergy. The more fervently committed a person becomes to a specific world view, the more difficult it is for him to be genuinely tolerant of divergent opinions and behavior. In the modern world, mere indifference is often praised as tolerance; but the truth is that only committed people have the opportunity to be genuinely tolerant of those who do not share their commitment. In his eagerness to win converts, the believing teacher may find himself turning the psychological thumbscrew or seeking to overwhelm his students with rhetorical devices in order to win them over to his way of looking at things.

It requires an act of faith to allow the facts to speak for themselves, to stand before one’s congregation or one’s students as an embodiment of belief rather than as a rabid propagandist. It requires an act of faith to rely on one’s commitment to careful scholarship and to the dissemination of truth instead of applying the pressure of the grade book or of public opinion to coerce acceptance of one’s preconceptions. (Coercion is out of place in matters of faith, whether it is a case of embarrassing unbelievers by lengthily insistent invitations or of downgrading an examination paper because it expresses unbelief and other divergence of opinion.) It requires an act of faith to leave results to the Holy Spirit of God.

Endurance of selfish haggling about seniority, rank, and privilege is one of the occupational hazards of teaching. In Christian education, this haggling is usually disguised and carefully submerged; but it often reasserts itself in a strangulating control over student behavior that extends even to attempts at thought-control. It is time that Christian teachers consider the implications of Matthew 20:26 and 27: “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.”

The fact is that students were not made for teachers, but teachers for students. Students are not paid for studying; teachers are paid for teaching because they are the servants of their students, and preachers are paid for preaching because they are the servants (ministers) of their congregations. Few would argue with this principle; yet relatively few really demonstrate the reality of all this in their classroom or pulpit demeanor. Teaching is too often a one-way street, a doling out of facts and attitudes that the students know they must believe or pretend to believe if they are to pass muster. Often it does not occur to teachers to listen to what their students have to say except during a factual and perfunctory quizzing in which the student attempts to read the teacher’s mind and thus win approval. This student subservience is, of course, the very opposite of the way things ought to be: the teacher-servant must get himself out of the way when learning requires student articulation.

Few teachers encourage intelligent dissent and the expression of honest doubt. Few teachers encourage their students to evaluate everything they are told and to hold fast only that which is good (this would include, of course, the discarding of any falsehoods or semi-truths that the teacher himself may be guilty of disseminating). Few teachers have the courage to invite open criticism of their ideas and open questioning of their methods. Few teachers strive to teach students the method of thinking required in the subject at hand, so that eventually the student will no longer need a teacher but will be able to arrive at reasonably accurate conclusions on his own. Yet this is what teaching is all about—and what students of the seventies will clamor for.

Why are so few teachers willing to listen, to pay respectful attention to students, to stand upon an equal plane in every way except that of educational advantage, and to encourage eventual independence of themselves? I submit to you that the root of the problem is ego, insecure defensiveness, sheer selfishness. And it is sad indeed that the problem should be as acute in Christian education as it is in the secular world—perhaps even more acute. The fact that we Christians believe the Bible to be the Word of God does not confer infallibility upon our interpretations of that book or any other book; and if the fountain of truth is to be preserved from stagnation, it must be permitted to flow freely through open debate and honest discussion. In the educational dialogue, no subject can be banned; in the wrestling match to liberate men’s minds from the bondage of ignorance, the teacher must restrain himself from taking unfair advantage, yet may not restrain his students from any intellectual holds they may wish to use. Only through their revealing of themselves can the teacher learn what is needed in this situation at this moment.

Students today, the students who are about to begin on the decade of the seventies, want to be up to their necks in contemporary affairs, including the processes of their own education. And whereas students of the fifties may have sat politely through lectures or sermons that they considered irrelevant, throughout the decade of the sixties students have become increasingly honest with themselves about their own emotions. When they form a captive audience, as they do in most schools and colleges, they will usually become cynical and will bitterly parrot the acceptable answers in classroom recitation or on tests. (The facts of human variety being what they are, a teacher should examine before God if all student responses dutifully echo his own point of view: something has to be amiss.) On the other hand, when today’s students are not a captive audience, as in Sunday school or church, their response to irrelevance is simply to walk out as soon as they are old enough to make their own decisions. It will not do to blame the Church’s loss of teen-agers on the worldliness of the teen-agers themselves; if they were participating in really honest discussion of subjects they felt were meaningful to them, they would not be leaving. If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.

Everybody these days is talking about student revolutions, student revolts. The common denominator of these revolts is that students want everybody, rich and poor, black and white, educated and ignorant, to be recognized and respected as a human being with a unique and valuable selfhood. But the classroom or the church in which there is no honest dialogue is by its very format denying the unique value of each person in attendance.

It takes a real person to hold dialogue with another person; and I believe there has not been enough talk in evangelical circles about the need for authentic personhood. A teacher who is not a real person cannot understand why students object to being classified in various boxes, as B students, D students, C students, hippies, rebels, and the like. Reality always defies such neat classifications. But if a teacher is masked to himself, he is implicitly confident that the best thing for everybody is to be reduced to wearing an identical mask; whereas the students of the seventies will want the freedom to develop toward their own personal goals.

Obviously the first step for every teacher who seeks a new effectiveness with the current generation is a radical confrontation of himself before the eyes of God. He must decide whether he has learned to take full responsibility for what he is becoming, whether he is choosing rather than drifting, whether he is living every day significantly in the awareness of death. Only when he has shouldered the responsibility of his own dreadful freedom is he able to respect the freedom of his students to take responsibility for what they are becoming. The quest for authenticity is life-long, and the price is often high. I think that $25 visits to a qualified psychologist are not too much as partial payment, if they are necessary; nor are long hours of introspection and uncomfortable prayer and disquieting reading. When once a teacher has squarely faced the paradoxical value-and-depravity of his own personhood, he will no longer waste psychic energy in a futile attempt to whip other people into conformity with himself or some preconceived norm. He will be free to recognize, respect, and enjoy the otherness of the persons who are his students.

Some of the practical outworkings of his respect for others will be that the teacher will never walk unprepared into his classroom, because he values the time of the persons who are his students just as fully as he values his own time. He will grade papers as promptly and thoroughly as he can, giving each paper the kind of personal attention he would desire for the products of his own mind. His comments on papers will be future-directed; that is, they will attempt to help the student discover what his paper indicates about his personality, about directions he might want to explore further, about pitfalls he might wish to avoid.

The teacher who is an authentic person will speak to his students as one human being to another. He will listen respectfully to opinions differing from his own, and will rid himself of the foolish notion that a doctor’s degree raises him to a higher level of humanity than that of his students. He will also rid himself of the notion that a degree of authority in one discipline confers authority in all of them, or that authority confers the right to be authoritarian. Above all, he will give his students as much opportunity for self-direction as their level of maturity can manage.

One way of summarizing all that I have been saying is this: The teacher who respects his students will enter into an I-Thou relationship with them; indeed, it will become an intellectual love affair. In the course of this love affair, the teacher will do everything he can to help his students avoid ventriloquizing or playing Little Sir Echo. He knows that uncritical student adoption of his point of view constitutes self-betrayal; so he encourages critical thinking by assigning books and articles that take opposite views and by rewarding intelligent dissent—not merely tolerating, mind you, but rewarding it. (Even in Christian doctrine, reading and thoughtfully refuting dissenting opinion is often more strengthening than reading what is familiar and agreeable. When should a student encounter opposing views, if not under the guidance of a thoughtful Christian teacher?)

Because the object of the authentically concerned teacher will be to assist people toward independence of himself, he will be increasingly aware that all classes are methods classes. On every level, teaching in the seventies must emphasize “methods of thinking about this subject” rather than the memorization of facts deemed important by the teacher. I am not saying that there should be no difference between introductory and advanced classes; but I do insist that the difference should be the opposite of what it currently is. Right now in most schools, the introductory courses are usually superficial factual surveys, and only the advanced courses get into any rigorous theory. But the opposite should be true: the introductory courses should concentrate on theoretical reasoning within the subject-matter area, indicating the mode of intellectual effort required while the more advanced courses should get down to the problems, facts, and formulas that are of interest to the specialist.

Thus a college course called introduction to literature will unabashedly be a course in how to read—how to pay proper attention to such factors as sound and symbol and structure. An introductory history course will deal more with the methods of historical investigation than with a staggering procession of facts—because only specialists will ever use and therefore remember the details anyway. An introduction to mathematics course will concentrate on how to think mathematically, while an introduction to science will concentrate on methods of controlled experimentation.

This means, of course, that the finest professors must be willing to teach the introductory college courses, which usually require a great deal of detailed papergrading to clarify for struggling minds the new ways of thinking with which they are confronted. Because of the human tendency toward sloth, it may be that the most experienced professors will refuse to take up this responsibility. But I feel certain that if enough college faculties “tune in” to student pleas for a sensible curriculum, this arrangement will come to pass. If we learn to care more about the students and about dissemination of truth in logical progression than we do about our own ease, we will not claim seniority to free ourselves from introductory courses. And the same principle applies to Christian high schools, grade schools, and Sunday schools.

It is irresponsible to think of classes as packages of information that in combination with X-number of other packages will produce an educated man. Outraged students have been trying to tell us so, with sit-ins and placards and sometimes with violence. (Christian schools that boast they have no student rebels should look again: apathy and stubborn silence often constitute the revolt-tactics of those who know that any overt rebellion would meet with extreme retaliation.) Because students are sometimes unable to express their desires clearly, teachers must learn to listen with what Theodore Reik calls “the third ear,” understanding intuitively that although the placard says one thing, the student who carries it is often looking for something else.

If the Sunday-school teacher is disturbed by the bored faces and glassy eyes in his classes, he must stop repeating the same stories with the same applications; if high-school and college teachers are concerned about apathy or more violent rejection, they must stop droning through the same angles on the same subjects year after year. Careful listening to our students and to their culture will tell us which issues are the real ones, and it is to these issues that we must address ourselves. Ultimately we are presenting our belief in a Creator-Redeemer God who exists in independence of man’s knowledge of him, yet has revealed himself in the Bible; but only if this Christian preconception is carefully related to the concerns of the “now generation” will the issue be made plain.

At any rate, I believe that in answer to the student cry for freedom and independence and self-determination, the authentic teacher of the seventies will teach every course as a methods course. It is far more important that my students know how to make sense out of Paradise Lost or First Corinthians 13 on their own than that they memorize my interpretations of those works. Hence, I must show them how to ask the right kinds of questions and must constantly demonstrate how to arrive at accurate interpretations and how to test that accuracy. Method, method, method. And what’s more, method in logical progression: first the broad basic theory, then advancement into special kinds of problems.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.