The teacher is a midwife. Or at least that is what Socrates claims, as reported by Plato in the Theaetetus. As it happens, I have a moderate amount of experience with midwives, because my wife elected to have the six of our nine children delivered by them. A midwife knows everything needful for delivery, but she knows it, shall we say, personally? She knows it from the point of view of the psyche of the mother. She understands how adjusting the mother’s posture can lessen the pressure on the tailbone, she knows the exercises that can encourage the baby to flip the right way round. She can adapt to circumstances, supporting the delivery as the needs of the mother dictate. But the mother must deliver the baby. The midwife is a help, a great and necessary help, a marvel sent by God for the consolation of His children. But the mother must do the work.
This, the relationship of midwife to mother, is precisely analogous to the relationship of teacher to student.
The student must do the work of learning. The student must bring forth an idea: a thesis for a paper, a proof for a theorem, an hypothesis for a lab. The student must labor in articulating that idea, giving it shape, and making it clear. And then the student must give that idea away, presented boldly to the candid world for judgment.
The teacher’s job is to be a help to the student. The teacher gives the student the material to think about: the reading of Shakespeare, the worked-out example problem. The teacher gives the student guidance on the forming and shaping of an idea. The teacher gives the student feedback on the final work. These are “helps” that support the student. They are marvelous, necessary helps, a gift of God. But they are helps. The student must do the work of learning.
I wonder then if we think sufficiently about the sorts of helps we are offering our students. Let us consider an example. Bernard lets Dante copy his homework, so that Dante doesn’t get a zero for the day. Dante perceives this as a help because it avoids the negative outcome of the bad grade, but in truth it risks making Dante’s life worse. The skill, the habit of mind, which that homework would have trained Dante in, is left unformed, untrained. Dante is a worse person than he might have been. Bernard did not help.
Indeed, if Dante is not worse off for having not done his homework, then the homework was not a help! Perhaps you are thinking of those many classmates you knew that did not do their homework (not you, dear reader, of course not you). They are perfectly fine! No harm has come to them at all. A successful job, a happy family, a growing 401k.
It is the grim truth that much of the content of K-12 education is largely unimportant to the adult worker. Almost nobody ever factors a trinomial into two binomials after high school. And yet, and yet, upwards of six or eight weeks of instruction in factoring and related topics occupy the waking hours of the American Algebra student. Is this training, this skill a stillborn child? One who passed untimely in its infancy?
The teacher must be a help to his students. Training in useless skills is not that. But perhaps we can give a different vision of the teacher. The teacher must provide lessons full of rich content, awakening the imagination, inspiring the soul. The teacher helps the child to discern truth, to pursue the good, and to delight in the beautiful. Any exercise, any homework, any project, any lab, any math problem must have this help as its aim. The teacher must help the child to give birth to the adult.
In the soul are many powers: the power of judgment, of discerning; the will to wonder, to persist in the face of the difficult. The cultivation of these powers – to grow, to be fierce in the face of fear and gentle at every moment of grace, to love and laugh, to hate and fight, to dance, to run, to stand straight and tall – the cultivation of these is the work of the teacher.
The job of the teacher is to be a help to his students. It is the case that training in factoring is a help. It cultivates a mind that is nimble with challenges, that can quickly discern hidden patterns and operates fruitfully in novel circumstances. Activities of this kind give a vision of the complexity of problem solving, and therefore the broad utility of heuristics, heuristics that go beyond simple algorithmic thinking.
For a teacher to teach factoring this way, to teach it as cultivating the powers of the soul, it is not sufficient that the teacher makes sure the student knows how to get the right answer. That is almost no help at all, standing on its own. No, indeed, getting the right answer is the great triumph, the moment of glory and success, the fruit of days of labor. The teacher’s help is in the cultivation of that labor, so that the student can bring forth that fruit. In the labor is the cultivating of virtue. And the virtues – the strengths of the powers of the soul – are what will last, are what will be a help to the student. Note that in this conception of teaching, it is quite irrelevant whether the skill taught is, in its particularity, useful later to the child grown to adulthood. Its use is precisely in its ability to help the child to grow to adulthood.
In his book How to Solve It, George Polya explains the teacher’s task this way:
One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to help his students. This task is not quite easy; it demands time, practice, devotion, and sound principles. …
The best is … to help the student naturally. The teacher should put himself in the student’s place, he should see the student’s case, he should try to understand what is going on in the student’s mind, and ask a question or indicate a step that could have occurred to the student himself.
To teach this way is to teach personally. Just as the midwife is a true help to the mother giving birth to a child, so also the teacher is a true help to the child in his intellectual formation. Teaching this way means asking, what is the case of this particular child? What is a question that could have occurred to him on his own? These are the questions I shall ask. And together we, teacher and student, shall grow in virtue.
