Having spent the better part of the past ten years teaching, both at schools and universities, public and private, I have come to certain conclusions about the art of learning, and the more difficult art of teaching, which I thought I might distill here into ten useful lessons. I should even like to call them my ten commandments: were it not for my mortal fear of writing anything in the imperative. Here they are, in no particular order:
There is no such thing as a good or bad student. The only measure of a student’s worth is how curious he or she is. By contrast, she who can instill this curiosity in her student is the definition of a good teacher.
We as a society tend to send rather confusing messages to our children. We say some kids are more gifted than others, and yet berate those others for not working hard enough. We say trying is more important than winning, and yet, it is the winners we always reward, the losers we always punish, and it is for rewards alone we live. To praise a student for hard-work, or their talent, is as dangerous as it is to find fault with him for not trying hard enough, or, to give up on him for not having talent. The prizes of the world degrade a man as much as the world’s punishments.
Two other words we have long begun to outgrow, and we had better be rid of: laziness and will-power. When we call someone lazy, we merely reveal our own ignorance of the causes and circumstances that prevent someone from being curious about the world. As for will-power: it is only a matter of time before science proves it false, and we recognize it for the harsh and cruel idea that it is. Putting a kid down in the name of grit, and reproaching her for what she cannot help being, is the surest way to thwart a nascent love of learning.
Suffering is not (always) learning, nor is all learning conscious. It is often held that boredom, tediousness, and suffering are essential ingredients of learning and that all learning is ‘effort’. Those who hold this view should not then be surprised that so many students should hate school and hate learning. In truth, both learning and teaching are effortless. Ask, if you want, an athlete, a dancer, or an artist: they will not deny the hours of training they had to put in, nor all the discipline they had to muster. But it was no ‘effort’. Or if it was, they were not conscious of it.
If there is a skill fundamental to all of education, it is reading. For, it is reading that enables us to: (a) sit still in a room on our own, without being terrified of solitude or boredom, and (b) be comfortable engaging with the thoughts of others, as well as our own. What, after all, is education but the ability to think for oneself?
To learn anything at all in mathematics or the natural sciences requires that we cultivate a desire to solve problems on our own, without fear of challenge, and without fear of getting things wrong. The ideal textbook of mathematics would be nothing more than a series of problems beginning with the proposition 1 + 1 = 2, and ending with eiπ + 1 = 0, the most beautiful equation in all of mathematics.
If you want to test whether you have understood something, it is far better to try and teach someone ignorant about that topic than it is to sit an examination. If you cannot explain the idea of a fraction to a ten-year-old, you cannot claim to have understood it yourself. Equally, if, as a teacher, you want a student to fall in love with your subject, you had better be in love with it yourself. It is hard to convince a student of the value of learning Greek if the thought of reciting Homer or Aeschylus does not stir the same passions in you as being in the company of a loved one.
Memory and understanding are closely related, but far from identical. Our examinations test far too much of the first, and not enough of the second. If only they would test the second -- if test they must -- the first would take care of itself.
The purpose of schools, and the purpose of education, should not be in the saturation of our memories with needless facts and tedious information. (If our present digital age has anything to commend itself, let it be in the outsourcing of such burdens to the machines built for that purpose.) It should rather be in the creation of memories, at once beautiful and indelible: of friendships forged, of passions identified, of discoveries made, and of vocations recognized. Few people have the power to mold as many futures as teachers do.
The things that are most valuable in education, as in life, are also the hardest to teach and the hardest to learn: a sense of wonder, the value of doubt, the significance of life at large and of our own insignificance in it, the limits of knowledge, and the capacity to be at peace with what we do not or cannot know. Only she who’s imbued with a sense of the ineffable can be a truly good teacher, and only he who has learned it, truly wise.