One reason I accepted with pleasure when Richard Schramm invited me to participate in the pilot seminar with the teachers of Walter Williams High School was the fact that it was the teachers themselves who had proposed our seminar topic. They expected no formula for answering their question--What does it mean to be an American?--but they did want to come at it historically, to learn if it had always been as contested as it is today. Who has claimed the American name? By whose permission? Does it indicate more than the accident of being born on a particular expanse of land demarcated by boundaries established by oceans, wars, and treaties? Does it signify more than the right to carry a passport with an eagle embossed on the outside and a notice inside prohibiting the importation of goods from Cuba, Libya, and Iraq?
The teachers who walked into our planning meeting in the spring of 1992 were as diverse as the texts, from Tocqueville's Democracy in America to a script of I Love Lucy, that we ended up choosing to read with them. Some were veterans who had lived for years with low pay and lower prestige while watching the literacy and civility of their students decline to almost nothing. Others were fresh out of college, with a zeal still so evident that they were almost embarrassed by it.
The first thing we agreed was that there would be no discussion of lesson plans, or how to use body language effectively in the classroom, or the numerology of grading. The Kassons and I were not there to give advice to adults who knew more than we did about how to engage adolescents with ideas. The whole pleasure of the seminar was that these teachers had joined it out of a sense of intellectual urgency rather than job obligation.
It may sound grandiose, but what was on their minds was nothing less than the destiny of the American republic. They were passionately committed to the principle that a democracy depends on an educated citizenry. And they believed that the quality of a liberal education can be measured by how deep a sense of the past it imparts.
It was on this point that their lives as citizens and professional educators converged. They were appalled at how completely their students live in a kind of perpetual present that does not follow upon anything or lead toward anything. With frightful unanimity, they said what my friend (and a former National Humanities Center Fellow) Morris Dickstein has expressed in a recent issue of Partisan Review:
Because of the media and television, young people today feel that they have instant and simultaneous access to everything that's happening anywhere in the world at any moment. They feel no surprise at being there for the coup in Chile and for anything that happens in any corner of the world. But they seem to have difficulty with any . . . historical view of reality. This present-mindedness of constant and simultaneous access . . . [has] never been able to give us a convincing account of what occurred in a premedia world. There are attempts: films like Glory and the multipart Civil War documentary try for some kind of meticulous recreation of some past time . . . which would convince our students that other people truly existed in earlier times, and that their lives were as vivid and passionate and as problematic as ours.
This feeling that their students lack any sense of the actuality of the past came across powerfully when one of the younger teachers, during our discussion of the Cold War, spoke out in a personal way. Her father, she said, had served on a U.S. naval vessel in the Pacific that was cruising near the site of nuclear tests in the 1950s, before the effects of radiation exposure were understood, or at least before they were publicly acknowledged. Years later he began to suffer terribly from a cancer that seems likely to have resulted from his service. Yet he never doubted his obligation to serve.
This teacher spoke about her father with neither praise nor dispraise. She was puzzled by his unquestioning loyalty, but she was also moved by it. She possessed, in other words, exactly the awareness that Morris Dickstein thinks is becoming extinct--and she turned that awareness into a historical and personal question: Why did her father believe so fervently in something that her students today can barely imagine? How could the United States have meant so much to him when he was barely older than her students, to whom it now means so little?
What she and her colleagues expressed with such questions was a vivid and vital sense that there really are divergent ways to apprehend the world. They understood that a word or symbol (a name, a flag) can mean one thing to one person and something utterly different (or nothing at all) to another. This point may seem banal to academics seasoned in the platitudes of postmodernism, but it is actually difficult, if not impossible, to grasp it in all its implications. One way to construe what it means to be educated is to say that humanistic knowledge entails feeling, not just knowing, that people have apprehended the natural world and the moral world of human obligation differently over time. As far as I can make out, those differences are what we call history.
I am not sure it is possible for anyone, no matter how gifted, to convey this feeling to someone who has no inkling of it before the lesson begins. But I do think that good teaching is about sustaining and refining it whenever and wherever you find it. As everyone knows who has ever taught, this is hard work--and the opportunity is often squandered. One moment when the awareness of what I am calling history threatened to drop out of our seminar, but came back because one of the teachers refused to let it go, came during our discussion of a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson. Here are the first two stanzas:
My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
In Corners--till a Day
The Owner passed--identified--
And carried Me away--And now We roam in Sovereign Woods--
And now We hunt the Doe--
And every time I speak for Him--
The Mountains straight reply--
This poem may profitably be read as a woman's account of what it means (and how it feels) to be directed by a man, confined to the status of an instrument of his will, and allowed only enough independence to serve as a facilitator of his pleasure. At first, the teachers seemed convinced by such a reading, and they added to the discussion many particular insights that tended to support it. Then, toward the end of the session, one usually voluble member of the seminar (who had been strikingly silent) spoke up. What she said was roughly this: This poem moves me as an expression of erotic power. It reads like a transcript of my own marriage. It celebrates the completion of one human life by its cleaving to another. It is about the mystery of how the surrender of will can enlarge the self. It is a love poem. What we concluded at the end of this discussion was not that one side or the other had won the day on behalf of its reading--but that the poem existed in the difference between them.
Now this discussion cannot be said to have yielded any "contribution to knowledge." It neither depended on nor facilitated what we would call research or scholarship. It was not even the kind of teaching that's likely to foster research or scholarship by the student. Some of my colleagues back home made it clear to me that they thought I was wasting my precious research time.
So what was I doing? And why was the National Humanities Center--a research institute, after all--letting me do it?
The answer, I think, is the same that accounts for why research scholars devote time to teaching undergraduates: the novelty, the originality, of the insights to our students is more than enough to justify our labor and time. The Walter Williams teachers may not have read much in John Dewey's works on the theory of education, but they understood the point of teaching and learning precisely as he did, when he wrote in Democracy and Education that thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating. Acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act of inquiring. It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand. We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
Our teachers had been infected with this spirit of inquiry before they came to us, but I would like to believe that the Kassons and I helped make the infection a little more virulent.
I would like to conclude with a reflection on what these teachers did for me. The National Humanities Center is the best institution in the United States, possibly in the world, at bringing humanist scholars out of their customary professional environment and allowing them to reflect unimpeded, undistracted, on their chosen subjects of concern. That is its primary mission, and so it should remain. But even in this magical place, some residue of our professional identity lingers--the rituals, the habitual structures of thought, the patterns of speech that, in some cases, have become rote.
The teachers from Walter Williams High School were an antidote to all that. They were an antidote to the two worst things that can happen to an intellectual: self-satisfaction and detachment from life. On this point, I would like to close by reading what is perhaps the greatest passage in our literature about what it means to be exposed to such a shrunken spirit:
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshiper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches, his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history.
There was not one formalist, in Emerson's sense of the word, among the teachers from Walter Williams High School. Working with them left me, I think, less a formalist than I had been before, and more alert to the danger of becoming one. What I have tried to express tonight is how grateful I am to them, and to the National Humanities Center, for furnishing me with their example.
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