Gettin Ejecated

My younger daughter’s training as an instrumental music teacher included the requisite time in the grip of a fairly typical university education department, where she was predictably taught such departments' enlightened disdain for “traditional” teaching methods, and the customary progressive alternatives in student-friendly engagement which have helped make our public schools the marvel of the free world--at least in the sense that nowhere else do students have a higher ratio of self-regard to actual achievement.

Earning my own teaching certificate in the early seventies, I endured the same. Things don’t seem to have changed. Free spirits of the sort who haunted my university's education faculty unsurprisingly replaced themselves with more of their ilk; my children must now put up with them. The mantras they have their students humming are the same ones we were taught. They aren’t all wrong, but they involve a great deal of the pot calling the kettle black. To be sure, “traditional” teaching methods (like lecturing), which include those of that paragon of evil, the Authoritarian Teacher, don’t “work.” But no “method” does, including their non-method-method of sloganeering, cajolery, and getting everybody together in little groups.

This is because for a student to learn, his teacher must concentrate on finding and cultivating--and just important, avoid damming--the wells of desire and love from which issue all healthy growth of mind and soul. When this is done the student will understand the reason for his labor, and the value of guidance by a master--for the joy set before him, as it were--as the means to those ends, as it is to any worthy end.

Socrates, standing at the birthplace of the western academy, understood the master and his scholar are in a maieutic relationship that comprehends a nexus of infinitudes: the complex of wills and actions that result in the birth of a living child, or in the case of the learning situation, a lively and cultivated mind. In this the teacher must be a midwife, but can only be a midwife, and no more. He cannot be the mind he attempts to train, nor its progenitor, nor the source of its nourishment, nor the executive of its apprehension, nor the impulsive force of its labor in growth, complexity, and refinement. Those who expect these things from teachers do not understand what teaching is. The teacher does not create; he supervises, he draws out as one who is himself being drawn out. In this way he serves the Creator in his work with the creature, but he can do no more.

Many modern educators seem to have an intuition of the old wisdom that good teaching and learning is founded in love, but because they share the prejudices of their age they connect love with lassitude and assume this requires an essentially passive, non-directive, “soft” approach to teaching. This is as great an error as was ever committed by the soporific drone or the crone-with-a-hickory-stick with which they love to horrify those they are training to teach, for their own reaction to these old stereotypes is to be no teacher at all. It makes them uneasy to be known be a genuine master, with all the notions of hierarchy this implies, as someone who is to be appropriately honored for this achievement, and has the right to expect his students to respond to him as a their superior in learning.

Maieusis, the work of midwives, involves knowledge and opinion about the process and what its ends are. Those who practice it must understand what is normal and desirable, know error or anomaly, and take steps to correct it with as much force as is required to accomplish the right end. The teacher’s task, to be sure, is essentially that of a guide and encourager, but to do this he must know the path to be taken, and equally, what is not the path, and is to be discouraged. His knowledge of his subject is not to be imparted or simply transferred as much as put forward for the advantage of the learner--who is to make of it what he can, and may be examined by the master on that making, the examination, ideally, being for the master's learning as well as the student's.

On what pertains to mastery, the philosophy with which teachers’ trainers have been infected remains stolidly agnostic, so that they and their epigones find it difficult to guide the process of knowledge-birth, much less lay corrective hands upon it. The very idea of norms in processes or the ends they serve approaches obscenity in this guild. To express them is to expose oneself as a traditionalist or authoritarian--in the same sense a parent is when he insists on certain behavior toward certain well-defined ends for his children, and disciplines the child to the degree necessary to attain them. Sensing this, parents who love their children and desire the best for them (note the dogmatism, authoritarianism, and exclusivism contained in the very concept of “the best”!) are withdrawing them from schools where the teachers are trained by apes of the Zeitgeist.

As for my daughter, as a teacher of music she has two very great advantages over most of her academic colleagues. I hope she is able to take full advantage of both. First, she will be teaching elective classes, hence working with children who have expressed an interest in her subject. No one is forcing them to take band or orchestra: it may be assumed there is already a love of music present for her to increase, and with the increase of the love there will be an increase of its desires--she will be able to make them work hard at it and excel, if she manages things well.

Second, music, at least as it is still practiced in the preparatory schools, has not been much infected by its modernists. Like mathematics, it has right and wrong responses to what the notations propose. A B-flat is either in tune or not. The note or series played is the note or series written, or it is not. Pianissimo is softer--a lot softer, dang it--than mezzo-forte. If Sousa didn’t put a bump note at the end of the Trio, the person who isn’t paying attention and puts one there may never live it down. There are no feminists or deconstructionists or devotes of the twelve-tone scale--to my knowledge, saints preserve us--out there pooping on junior-high arrangements of the Pachelbel Canon or The British Eighth or excerpts from The Lion King. In this regard I assure my readers that Laura can, with a single well-placed glare, take out any of the “progressives” her groups may contain, for she will be working in a context where any advance on what is written is known by everyone present to be a mistake, and not only a mistake, but a mistake that makes everyone look bad.