Labor Day is one of those turning points in the year, and it gives us several things to think about once we have stopped thinking about beaches and hurricanes. It marks the symbolic end of summer of course, and the sad history of the Labor Movement, and the beginning of the school year.
Not many people will lie awake this holiday weekend feeling nostalgic about the Labor Movement. But Back to School is a big thing. Millions of students will be heading back to the classroom, ready or not. There they will encounter teachers, some of whom they will never forget.
We all have our own personal Pantheon of good and bad teachers, some more memorable than others. From high school I have vivid memories of one inspirational English teacher, one incomprehensible Latin teacher, and a Scottish chemistry teacher who told very good jokes but seemed to know very little about chemistry.
By the time we get to college we begin to appreciate not only the eccentricities and weak points of our teachers, but also their intellectual qualities. Here I was very lucky to encounter two memorable professors, who shared the same pedagogical goal. Both of them aimed to make us think by creating maximum intellectual uncertainty, and leaving us to find our own way out.
It's a good technique, at least for teaching in the arts and humanities. A doctor or an engineer perhaps should be full of certainty, but the rest of us should be full of doubt. What I got at college was a post-doctoral training in doubt.
My first memorable professor was in fact, or perhaps in theory, a teacher of French. In reality he spent no time teaching French, and much time confusing our minds. His technique was to throw out disorienting aphorisms or counter-intuitive statements that could and did make our heads spin, then wait for us to respond in some semi-intelligent or creative way. He did not believe in lecturing, or even teaching in the usual sense. He liked to get a dialogue going, the stranger the better, in any language, and let it develop however the participants chose.
Our professor of philosophy had a different system, but it worked much the same perplexing fashion. Every week on Tuesday he would give an inspirational lecture, exactly fifty-five minutes long, in which he invoked the genius, the profundity and the unquestionable rightness of one classic philosopher – Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, or whoever it might be. At the end when we students were all full of enthusiasm and even faith that we had found the truth at last, he would end the lecture and leave, taking no questions.
On Thursday he would return to the same subject, and explain the utter stupidity and unquestionable wrongness of the philosopher he had promoted on Tuesday. The following week it would be the same routine, and we all waited breathlessly for the end of the semester, when we would finally learn the right and true philosophy. The final lecture was on Karl Marx. By lunchtime of Tuesday we all believed that Marx was a philosopher next only to God, the man who had explained everything at last. On Thursday Marx was briskly destroyed in fifty five minutes, the professor walked out of the room, and that was that. By the end of the course we were all full of doubt about absolutely everything, which of course was the whole point.
I learned a lot from both professors, perhaps too much. I hope that some students starting college this year will be so lucky.
