When I first arrived on the Dartmouth campus three years ago, I was excited and grateful to be here. This was, after all, the college with a teaching legacy. Professors were known to be accessible to students and prided themselves on how -- as well as what -- they taught. As one professor put it, "At Dartmouth, your teaching matters as much as your scholarship."
I accepted the position knowing I'd have the best job imaginable: teaching would-be teachers in a liberal arts college. Dartmouth College was committed to insuring and extending its teaching legacy.
I honestly believed this was so.
Within the history of liberal arts education, some of its staunchest defenders have also been passionate advocates of teaching. Mortimer Adler observed that the liberal arts were "nothing but the arts of teaching and being taught." Echoing Adler, Columbia English professor Mark Van Doren defined these twin arts saying, "the art of being taught is the art of discovery, as the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery to take place: If teaching and studying are imagined on their highest level, and if it is understood that great books as well as people may qualify as teachers, the definition is not oversimplified. The great books are necessary. So, however, are the people; and it is always important that people should think it honorable to be teachers. When the profession is apologetic, society is not sound."
Van Doren was passionate in his belief that "liberal education ... needs more good teaching than now exists," and carefully pointed out the danger in assuming that "all one needs to know is one's own subject." Arguing for an expansive course of study in the preparation of teachers within liberal arts curriculum, Van Doren wrote:
Good teachers have always been and will always be. The necessity henceforth is that fewer of them be accidents. The area of accident is reduced when there is a design which includes the education of teachers ... The education of teachers is an education in the liberal arts. When this education is good, and falls on right ground, it produces persons with usable intellects and imaginations who know both what -- and why -- they are teaching.
At Dartmouth, education as a discipline is "apologetic" -- made that way through lack of administrative support and resources, despite its presence on campus for a hundred years, and despite the excellence of its courses and regard among students. By extension, the larger college community is "not sound." When, at the highest levels of College administration one hears discussion of "pulling the plug" on education, the measure of the academic community's ill health is taken and made painfully obvious to students attending this institution.
As a visiting assistant professor on an annually renegotiated, one-year contract (itself a telling statement about the value Dartmouth ascribes to preparing teachers), I find myself paying keen attention to such comments: the spirit in which they are made; by whom; the language used and the context in which they are framed. What I hear most frequently is that teacher preparation at Dartmouth is so dreadful it must be eliminated and farmed out elsewhere. This idea is voiced by people who have never spoken with me directly about what we in fact do in teacher preparation; have never spoken directly with students in the current teacher preparation program or the cooperating teachers with whom we gratefully work; have never asked to see our syllabi; have never asked to sit in on our courses or asked to watch our students take their beginning steps learning to become teachers. (Despite this, Joanne Baker, who assess teacher preparation programs for New Hampshire, recently said, "Dartmouth does an excellent job training teachers.")
Then with great authority, the selfsame people declare that courses offered within the education department are so dreadfully mediocre they are probably best taught by professors for whom education hasn't been a primary focus as would happen if the education department were downsized to a program.
Watching all of this is reminiscent of Woody Allen's character in "Shadows and Fog" -- constantly upbraided by his betters for failing to carry out his part in a master plan no one ever bothers to fill him in on.
Writing in the 1950s at the Teachers College at Columbia University, psychologist Arthur Jersild felt that long-standing tensions between liberal arts colleges and departments of education actually masked something even more troubling. Jersild wrote that teachers and administrators "fall in with institutionalized expressions of hostility when, for example [they] join in the antagonism that often prevails between colleges of liberal arts and schools of education."
One sanctioned outlet for the expression of institutionalized hostility on liberal arts campuses is the view that they are "non-vocational" and places reserved for scholarship. This view also holds that teaching isn't a calling but "vocational training" -- a denigrating euphemism for getting one's hands dirty -- and that teaching children in particular is best reserved for those beneath one. And in another day, reserved for women at state "normal schools" while gentlemen went to liberal arts colleges.
As a professor, one teaches. As a teacher, one professes: "profess" literally meaning "to make a confession before." By our actions we as "professors" confess we do not value what we do enough to see it as an art. Is the great teaching legacy here then one of mere showmanship -- a capacity one is merely born with? Why would we not want to teach our students about how we teach? Consciously, explicitly, tirelessly? Perhaps at heart is some element of projection in the College's desire to eliminate teacher preparation. Do we so thoroughly loathe our teaching work? Erasmus said once to a grumbling teacher, "I admit that your vocation is laborious, but I deny that it is tragic or deplorable, as you call it ... To be a schoolmaster is next to being a king ... In the opinion of fools it is a humble task, but in fact it is the noblest of occupations."
Yesterday I drove back from Enfield, NH, where I had observed one of the students in the Teacher Preparation Program extending her own liberal arts education. I watched as she taught a roomful of second graders about Camille Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals." I watched children, some of whom have never listened to classical music, captivated by pieces which actually sounded like animals. I watched children discuss the mood and tone of the music, watched as they drew and listened and learned, while my student learned about teaching, herself and her education.
And I was reminded once again of Erasmus' wisdom.
