The Good Life of Teaching

Introduction

Why We Need a Virtue Ethics of Teaching

I believe the impulse to teach is fundamentally altruistic and represents a desire to share what you value and to empower others. Of course, all teachers are not altruistic. Some people teach in order to dominate others or to support work they'd rather do or simply to earn a living. But I am not talking about the job of teaching so much as the calling to teach. Most teachers I know, even the most demoralized ones, who drag themselves to oppressive and mean schools where their work is not respected and their presence not welcome, have felt that calling at some time in their lives (Kohl, 1984, p. 7).

SAINTS AND SCOUNDRELS

Open any text on teaching and you are likely to find the same formula. It is nicely captured in this passage from Herb Kohl's well-known work, but there is no shortage of examples. Kohl tells us that teaching is altruistic, fundamentally so. If we find a non-altruist in the classroom then we have discovered an imposter to the role. From the point of view of working teachers, we all know there are days we live up to our ideals, and days that fall depressingly short of those hopes, and days that seem to dwell uncertainly in between. Yet in representations of teaching, we find instead a stark contrast of motivations: teachers are either serving students or using them. In the helping professions, it seems, one must not 'help oneself'. As one teacher recruitment campaign succinctly put it: 'You've made your own dreams come true. Isn't it time you started on someone else's?'1 In the educational imagination-from posters to policies, from monographs to movies-we find more and less restrained versions of the same Noh drama. Enter stage left-the selfless saints, devoted to nothing but the welfare of their students and martyred for the cause. Enter stage right-the selfish scoundrels: narcissists, lechers, and petty dictators of their classroom worlds.

What seems clear is that these two characters and, correspondingly, the two main discourses about teacher motivation-the inspirational and the suspicious-are but two sides of the same coin.2 Inspirational accounts tend to focus on the role of teacher, holding out an image of teaching as a noble service.3 These accounts suggest that teacher's personal interests and needs more or less harmonise with the demands of their role, and when they do not, that those needs can and should be addressed outside of work. Suspicious accounts turn to the person in the role in an attempt to reveal the hidden springs of self-interest and debunk this idea of the altruistic teacher.4 These accounts aim to show that such a division between personal and professional is impossible to maintain, and that trappings of the role become a cover for teachers who really want to feel smart, revisit their youth, vent their aggression, and so on. What is striking is that neither discourse seems capable of helping us understand how teaching might be the expression of the person who teaches. For in the second sort of story, there is no real teacher; in the first, there is no real person.

What these seeming rivals share is their attachment to the stark opposition between a lofty altruism and a base self-interest; neither lends itself to a believable portrait of teaching. Inspirational accounts ring hollow when they gloss over the immense difficulties and frustrations inherent in the life of a schoolteacher. They portray teachers as having no personal agenda, conveniently wanting only what students need, and needing only to give that. Suspicious narratives do offer a more believable psychology, helpfully acknowledging our human-all-too-human desires, needs, and weaknesses. However, they tend to assume that teachers have only a personal agenda, which they merely disguise with their talk of educational aims and student needs.

In contrast, my study asks how teaching might be the expression of one's personal ambitions and deepest motivations. It probes the reasons for our dichotomous tendency to imagine teachers as either selfless saints or selfish scoundrels and challenges the very idea of a 'helping profession'. It sets out instead to imagine the fate of the teacher struggling to be self-ful in the midst of a task that is overwhelming, an environment that can be deadening, and a professional culture that secretly prizes self-abnegation. In showing the resources the practice of teaching offers for self-cultivation, without minimising its very real challenges and constraints, we move closer to a humane, sustainable ethic of teaching.

A BRIEF FOR TEACHERLY SELF-CULTIVATION

Teaching is a helping profession, where caring teachers assist active learners. At the same time, education contains an ineliminable feature that pushes us past such dichotomous thinking. The feature, simply put, is that selfhood is contagious. In order to cultivate selfhood in students, teachers must bring to the table their own achieved self-cultivation, their commitment to ongoing growth, and their various practices, styles, and tricks for combating the many forces that deaden the self and distract us from our task of becoming. In this stubborn refusal to be sorted into a duty or an inclination, an act of altruism or of self-interest, the practice of teaching proves a rich ground for exploring one of the central human dilemmas and oldest ethical problems. How do we reconcile self-regard and concern for others? Can we live with the demands of human self-hood, that each of us exists for ourselves and for others, or will we allow the quest for individuation to collapse? Will we settle for so many semi-selves propping each other up: actors and facilitators, saints and scoundrels, 'mermaids and minotaurs'? (Dinnerstein, 1991 [1976]).

In teaching and other helping professions, such questions come to a sharp point. Here we encounter a powerful drive to sort ourselves into subject and object, for-oneself and for-others. The flourishing of the teacher sounds like an oxymoron. And yet, the logic of selfhood, emulation, and development pushes back against this tendency. Consider, if you will, the following argument for teacherly self-cultivation as a pressing practical and rich ethical issue (I first state the propositions in bare form and then discuss each further below):

1. Education, no matter what else it involves, involves self-cultivation.

2. Achieved and ongoing self-cultivation on the part of the teacher is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for fostering self-cultivation in students.

3. (from 1 and 2) Teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education.

4. Poor working conditions and the intense needs of students conspire to make such self-cultivation exceedingly difficult: the life of a teacher, it must be admitted, may be miseducative as often as it is educative.

5. Rather than recognise the teacher's self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice as a threat to teaching itself, we rationalise them with the rhetoric of service, we hail them as the call of duty and very mark of a teacher.

6. (from 3) But teaching is not a 'helping profession', if this is taken to mean that one helps others rather than oneself.

7. (from 4-6) Therefore, teaching should be understood precisely as one of the human practices that most clearly forces us to confront a fundamental existential tension: we exist for ourselves and for others, and while these two dimensions of life rarely fit together easily, neither do they work well alone.

The first proposition will strike some readers as patent and others as wildly utopian. This is not surprising if Philip Jackson is right that education has long been torn between two fundamentally different outlooks: the mimetic (or transmissive) and the transformative (Jackson, 1986).5 While the educational aim of self-cultivation is the very premise of the transformative outlook on teaching, it has come to seem largely out of place in K-12 schooling with the 'gradual ascendance of the mimetic tradition' (Jackson, 1986, p. 133). Two features of the current climate make it much easier to understand education as transmission of detachable skills and discrete knowledge. According to current wisdom, nothing exists that can't be measured and nothing can be measured that can't be measured by a standardised test. Since it is quite difficult to measure transformations and self-formation, this constitutes a distinct advantage for the mimetic model. The transformational model also runs up against our faith in liberal neutrality expressed in our belief that government-run schools in a liberal democracy can and should remain neutral on questions of the good life. Personal transformation as an educational aim cannot help but set off the Establishment-Clause alarm system.6 An education based in putatively neutral, transmissible skills and knowledge is a much easier sell.

Still, for thousands of years before this brave new world, the dominant assumption, whatever the specifics, was that education was self-formation. Such an education could be oriented around ideals of civic virtue, aesthetic sensitivity, or intellectual acuity. The educated person could be understood in terms of Cicero's oratory, Pico's dignity, or Austen's amiability. But if an education does not help you at all to answer the question, 'What sort of person are you going to become?', you should ask for your money back. I will close this brief defence of the first proposition with the rousing words of...