Aphorisms on Educating

I think of teaching as the moral responsibility of my academic discipline, literary studies, though this statement depends upon definition and some clear thoughts on the relationship between morality and higher education.

Morality (L. mores, “customs, habits”) articulates the standards by which a person’s behavior should be judged proper and good. Politics (Gk. poliz, “city-state”) is the public discourse concerned with the exercise of power for the purpose of altering the government of a given geographical space.

Universities should not try to make their students virtuous nor to change the government. Universities are for neither morality nor politics but the discovery and dissemination of facts, ideas, knowledge, and truth.

In my classroom I aim – using these words deliberately – to teach facts, ideas, and knowledge about literature that makes my students smart, and to instruct them how to read literature intelligently.

Here I am thinking about three kinds of epistemological strength. You can be smart; you can be wise; and you can be intelligent. You can be all three, of course, but I can only help you with two.

To be smart (OE smeorlan, “painful”) is to have the facts, ideas, and knowledge that can hurt anyone who dares disagree with something you say.

To be wise (PIE woid-, “to see”) is to have seen enough in your life that your ideas carry the authority of experience.

To be intelligent (L. inter, “between” + legere, “to choose”) is to have examined all the options available to choose between.

A smart person and an intelligent person both exhibit a mental capacity disconnected from morality. Smarts and intelligence are matters of strength and weakness, not right and wrong, and certainly not good and evil. A smart person can be immoral, and an intelligent person can be evil, but neither is epistemologically weak, which poses the problem of higher education without morality.

Wisdom is the epistemological strength of morality, but wisdom cannot be taught. It can only be learned. Students may gain wisdom in my classes, and I hope they do, but if I try to teach it, wisdom loses the experiential quality that defines it. Any moral education that occurs in my classroom comes directly from a student’s experience with a literary text, and not from my interpretation of it.

Much if not most of the literature I assign aims for the moral education of its audience, but that's not the intent of my instruction. What these texts need from me is a reading that precisely articulates the moral tensions an author puts in a text, and an analysis that explains the inherent virtue of writing and reading poetry.

I can’t make students wise, and I don’t try, but they will be smart if they are properly taught, and intelligent if instructed.

When I teach (OE. tæcan, “to show, point out”) my students, I rely upon my professional expertise to tell them which facts, ideas, and knowledge relating to literature are intrinsically valuable.

When I instruct (L. in, “within” + struere, “to build”) my students, I hope to build within their minds interpretive methods that are instrumentally valuable.

You teach content (com “together” + tenere “to hold”), or the intrinsically valuable information students should hold together in their minds, which is what you have a lot of when you’re smart. For example I might teach students that grammar puts things into a relationship with actions, or that Gorboduc was the first blank-verse tragedy in English, or that the Gunpowder Plot occurred in 1605, or that writing sonnets about God is problematic because it addresses divinity erotically, or that MLA style is better for formal analyses and Chicago for historicist. Knowing valuable information makes one smart, and to evaluate how smart students are you ask them to take a test demonstrating their mastery of the intrinsically valuable content it will be important to remember in the future.

You instruct form (L. forma, “shape, configuration”), or the instrumentally valuable shape of effective inquiry, which is what you know when you’re intelligent. For example I might instruct my students to define words etymologically, or to focus on rhythms that break a poem’s meter, or to think about how Milton’s prose relates to his verse, or to historicize literary forms when studying genre, or to write the kind of sentences they quote from others. Knowing valuable methodologies makes one intelligent, and to evaluate how intelligent students are you ask them to write a paper showing their mastery of the instrumentally valuable methodologies it will be important to use in the future.

In sum, to be smart is to have access to a wide range of facts, ideas, and knowledge, and to be intelligent is to have access to an ability to dynamically interpret facts, ideas, and knowledge once they have been acquired.

If the university of higher education exists to teach facts, ideas, and knowledge, and to instruct the means through which we search for truth, then the university does not exist for the moral education of the nation nor the political activism of any party. My professional morals – the standards I use to deem myself a good academic – dictate I not moralize in my classroom. I am moral by not doing morality.