The Primacy of Teaching

By Shamrock McShane

Given the choice between poison and a life where learning was proscribed, Socrates chose poison. Maybe you think Socrates was a chump. Some people do. My mentor, the historian Marvin Rosen, did. He said Socrates was hoodwinked by metaphysics.

But the fact remains that Socrates recognized no power beyond knowledge. He would drink hemlock before he would ignore his thirst for knowledge. That was what made him a great teacher, as his student Plato would attest.

So Plato began the Academy, and his student Aristotle began the Lyceum. The schools of the peripatetics, as they were called — because they did their talking while walking, were to last nearly nine hundred years. The Byzantine emperor Justinian finally shut them down, the last vestiges of classical Greek thought, to curry favor with the Holy Roman Empire.

Those ancient schools were based on the primacy of the teacher. If knowledge were to be the aim, only those whose lives were dedicated to learning could be trusted to communicate it from generation to generation, so that it might continue to grow and not be twisted to conform with the powers that be.

The best of a classical education still persists in Europe and England, where acquiring knowledge is developed in three stages called the trivium, proceeding from grammar to logic to rhetoric. But what we mean by public education in our noble experiment, democracy, is something entirely different.

It was John Quincy Adams who said, "The primary duty of government is the education of its citizenry." Thomas Jefferson, the first great proponent of public education in the United States, was steadfast in his belief that only an educated citizenry could preserve a democracy.

We live in a country where ninety percent of our kids go to public schools. In the rest of the world, public education is subsidized at a minimum at best, but here it is the soul of our democracy.

Alas, it seems that the founding fathers' vision of public education has become distorted over time. Somehow in this country, we have lost sight of basic pedagogical principles that are taken for granted in what is really "old school." We no longer have anything like a headmaster — someone who is a teacher with the additional responsibility of leadership in a school. Instead our ever–burgeoning educational bureaucracy has evolved an administrative class to assume leadership without the additional burden of teaching. And this is bogus.

How can schools adopt a business model without selling their souls?

The perceived decline into mediocrity in our public schools is paralleled by the rise of an administrative bureaucracy that strangles creativity in the classroom. It was from on high that our current test–driven curriculum was imposed. It certainly did not come from teachers, who understand that learning and testing are the polar ends of the educational spectrum. The former seeks to expand knowledge, the latter to enclose it.

Teachers are the hearts and minds of our schools. School board elections offer a clear choice. The chance exists, as it should in our democracy, to give a voice back to teachers.