What Makes a Good Teacher? - A Rhetorical Question

As we have noted previously in this space, the “scientific” approach to education over the last century has produced no significant, verifiable results. I believe it never will, for several reasons: human minds are too complex for all variables to be excluded; science is based on observation, and human minds cannot be observed; and there is an insurmountable observer paradox—the human mind cannot fully comprehend itself any more than one can completely swallow one’s body, or pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. And this is without considering the moral issues involved in experimenting on fellow human beings.

This being so, we are left with three useful sources for developing our philosophy of education:

1.Immediate student feedback (that is, these particular students, and even these particular students on this particular day);

2.Personal experience (what has worked for us in the past, as teachers or, even better, as learners; since only our own minds are directly observable by us); and

3.The wisdom of the ages (the advice or known practice of teachers of the past generally acknowledged as great).

We have already looked at personal experience; let's now consider option three.

We have dealt with the objection that relying on tradition is an intrinsically conservative approach: education is conservative by its nature, and seeking to avoid this only empties it of all content and makes it a waste of student time.

In fact, if we seek advice only from past teachers who have been great innovators—the Platos and Aristotles—we may actually come as close as possible to an education for innovation. For they, achieving great innovation themselves, are surely best placed to advice on how to show others to do likewise.

But it is also true that depending on long tradition is the most “scientific” approach. If a style of instruction has stood the test of time, for a great deal of time, this means it must have been perceived to have generated good results repeatedly, in a clinical context. This is really the best we can usually do when dealing with human beings—it is the approach commonly used in “scientific” medical practice. It is “empiricism” in that term's original meaning.

So, then, before we got involved in the notion of applying science to the classroom, and imagined we could study and understand fellow humans as we might an interesting kind of insect, what was the longest-standing style of teaching?

In a word: rhetoric. From the ancient world—from 500 BC or earlier—right up to the nineteenth century, training and ability in rhetoric was considered the essential qualification for a teacher, in all of Europe and North America. Rhetoric and “pedagogy” were virtually understood to be the same thing. Rhetoric: training in how to speak well; and, especially after the invention of the printing press, in how to write well.

Think about it: this makes perfect sense. The teacher is there to convey information, mostly in oral form. To be able to speak clearly, logically, and interestingly, is surely, next to knowledge of the subject, the most important skill for any teacher to have.
How interesting, then, that this is no part of the training of modern teachers at all. How could we overlook it?

As noted in this space in the past, when the US government undertook a huge, multi-year study to determine which of the various teaching theories produced the best results, Operation Follow- Through, most of the models produced and preached by the schools of education, based on the currently fashionable educational theories, actually did worse than the control. In other words, teachers' colleges test out as worse than no training at all. The one approach that clearly succeeded, “Direct Instruction,” was developed not by a teacher, but by an advertising executive.

But there you have it: experience in advertising is training in rhetoric, in presenting information compellingly. Skill in rhetoric is thereby proven to improve teaching, in scientific terms. Next to subject knowledge, it is the sine qua non, and perhaps only an academic could be foolish enough to think otherwise.

Happily, we have a vast body of thought, analysis, and literature on the subject—that lies in our libraries collecting dust. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Augustine, Erasmus, Aquinas—almost every major thinker in our history has written a treatise. Not to mention other cultures: Confucius, Al Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, and so forth. All of their techniques, unlike our own, have been tested objectively. It is not only that they have stood the test of time: rhetorical techniques can be and are proven or disproven daily in the courts and legislatures of all lands, and so the best techniques can be pretty objectively known. On top of this, until modern times, lecturers had to earn their reputations and their livelihoods by attracting listeners to their classes. So these men must know whereof they speak.

Of course, in our high-tech times, and with the Internet, “rhetoric” must be considered more broadly than it has been in the past: to include not just speaking and writing, but the presentation of images, videos, animations, interactive exercises and simulations. But here too, we have some valuable guidance. Magazine publishers, for example, or newspaper publishers, have very clear data on what sorts of illustrations are most compelling. They know, because when they put them on their covers, they sell more copies then the previous month. So too, they must know what sorts of things people like to read—or go out of business. With the Internet, we can test almost anything in terms of media, quickly, by the number of hits it can attract.

This is the direction teaching, and teacher education, ought to take. This is the direction teaching, and teacher education, must take. If not, the profession will simply wither and disappear, because, with the Internet, it no longer can expect a captive audience. The schools at all levels have lost their monopoly on knowledge.