I’m aware that I could just be getting overly sensitive as I get closer to completing the Ph.D, but I’ve been thinking lately about all the folksy sayings there are disparaging teachers and comparing us to children.? Ten-year-olds on their MySpace pages know more about how computers work than do programming professors.? A child on the playground knows more about ethics than a Ph.D in philosophy.? An youngster reciting the Pledge of Allegiance could say more important things about what it means to be an American than a professor of political science.? A pious four-year-old could teach one more about God than a room full of seminary professors.
My first, defensive thought was that I hardly ever hear such things about other professions.? A kid with a plastic stethoscope could teach you more about how to cure your bacterial infection than could a physician?? Hardly.? A kid playing Hot Wheels knows more about how to fix a carbeurator than an auto mechanic?? I don’t think so.? The teenager yelling at the television knows more about college football than Mark Richt?? Come to think of it, the dynamic gets flipped there–anyone questioning the professionals in professional sports gets labeled a know-nothing, someone little better than an English professor in the grand scheme of things.
But beyond that, hoping soon to become a professor myself and being the father of someone who’s almost a four-year-old, I know of at least one thing that both of us can do, but I can do better, and one thing that he just can’t do yet, and in the end, I think that the riffs about professors and children are interesting because of the ways they’re wrong.
I’ve heard more than my share of stories about four-year-olds and their endless string of “why” questions.? When Micah does that, I’ll answer the first couple questions, but rather than defaulting to the “because I said so” to which the frustrated parent is supposed to default, I try to reverse the line of questioning, making him answer his own questions eventually.? Perhaps some sentimental parents would call Socratic questionings turned on a three-year-old child abuse, but when I have the discipline to do this, Micah seems genuinely to appreciate the chance to answer Dad’s questions.? And that’s what we teachers do that four-year-olds do–we ask questions.? The difference is, of course, that beyond the lexicon of interrogative words, we teachers often have spent what time we’ve spent on earth reading the questioners who came before us, learning from Hume to question claims to authority, from Aquinas to question theological claims based on proof-texts, from Socrates to question whether popular conceptions of things like piety and justice point to anything really pious or just.? And with that sort of arsenal and something analogous to a four-year-old’s curiosity, we teachers, perhaps even a room full of us, stand dangerous to “common sense” understandings of things, which are just as often convenient lies as they are time-tested truths, and to folks whose comfort relies on the fixedness of those understandings.
That lifetime of reading has given us teachers, whether we’ve read books or newspapers or people’s lives (this is not exclusive to college teachers, though I think we have a valid claim to it), a sense of how to frame a story.? What makes children cute and teenagers infuriating is that they have an absolute sense of right and wrong but no sense that there’s a larger context in which their infallible pronouncements on the universe might look quite different.? To deny Micah his chocolate cookie until he’s eaten some “grownup food,” as he calls it, is to push the unpleasant instead of the pleasant, and since pleasure is in its own right better than displeasure, Dad is doing a great evil.? To deny a teenager a personal cell phone line (I’m not even pretending that I’ll have the strength to do this in nine years) is to cut off the poor soul from all of the important communications that the world can offer.? Of course, seen inside a larger frame, grownup food is ultimately better for a human body, and cell phones? are just as likely to distract someone from what’s really important as they are to relay anything important via voice or text.? But without the proper frame, such claims are not only nonsense but arbitrary tyranny.
Such things do not stop at the teenage years, of course.? Remembering my own professors when I was an undergrad and a seminarian, I know now, years later, that I was not only reading the books they assigned but watching them live the lives of educated Christians, and only now, with a greater ability to frame those experiences, do I realize that from two professors at Milligan I learned how to be married as professional teachers (as Mary and I are attempting to do), from another how to teach in ways that recognize both the urgent truth of what’s true and the contingencies and weaknesses of students who do not want to hear the truth but might with patience come around, from another still that students can call somebody what they will, but good teaching will bear out, even if years later.? Watching one seminary professor I saw the humility that comes with realizing that the classroom is bigger than any teacher; I saw in another the possibility and the glory of being an indisputably great scholar and an unforgettably wise teacher in the same person; with another still I watched a passionate hatred of bad ideas inadequately tempered by patience for erring human beings end a career and take a good teacher away from the next generation of students who could have benefited from that passion.? The things that a four-year-old could never teach me, the constant struggle within circumstances to maintain integrity and the love for the human beings behind the ideological facades and the savor for moments of genuine learning that one must mine from the drudgery of an academic’s life, I gleaned, without at the time knowing it, from the lives and the classes of those academics, the folks who are supposed to be so insulated that they cannot teach anything worthwhile to anyone.
So in the end, if you tell me that you’ll take the child over the room full of seminary professors, you know what my response will be.
Why?
And if you answer honestly, you’ll only prove my point that it takes wisdom and experience truly to appreciate innocence.
