On the Margins of Teaching

"I was thinking of studying medicine...
then circumstances willed that I become a teacher..."
More than one teacher has repeated this sentence in my presence, and I have listened in silence, all the while sensing through it the inferiority complex that afflicts most teachers — I do not say all of them — and trying to analyze it and bring its causes to light, with bitterness and pain in my heart.

Is a man born a teacher? Psychologists hold that in every human being there is some inclination toward teaching and guidance, but that in some people it is stronger than in others. Let us suppose that no small number of our teachers were born teachers, with an instinctive bent for the company of children and for training them, and with a capacity for artistry in the methods of instruction — and artistry is the first quality of the gifted teacher. Yet most of these gifted ones soon see their talents killed and their ardor cooled under the pressure of the nerve-racking circumstances that surround the teacher and sap his resolve.

He sees that in name he ranks among the members of the intellectual professions, but that in fact he earns no more than petty laborers. And beyond that, he sees for himself no social standing, no esteem from his milieu, to console him for his material poverty. A doctor may fail in his profession so that it yields him nothing, yet he contents himself with people's respect and their awe of him, and consoles himself with the title "Doctor." Not so the teacher; his last refuge is to turn mystic and dissolve himself for the sake of God — a thing feasible only for the chosen few whose natures were formed with mystical leanings. And suppose he does turn mystic and consents to sacrifice himself in the service of humanity: he is still at a loss in which institutes of learning to spend his mystic's life; for our schools, however various their kinds, are equal in their defects. Some are still in the primitive stage, ruled by chaos. Some are afflicted with the disease of reaction and sectarian fanaticism. And some impose upon the teacher flattery, submission, and the denial of his own personality. The reader will perhaps understand what I mean by each of these categories.

In vain do they try to tempt the teacher by saying that great men — the likes of Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, al-Hajjaj, and al-Ghazali — were teachers. For he knows that these men became great only when they left teaching, or pushed it to the margin of their lives, or gave it a small share of their time and turned to other work for the rest. They say that Einstein tried to make his living from teaching and pursue his mathematical studies at the same time, but before long he abandoned the profession, saying, "These schools exhaust their teachers and leave them no time to breathe." And in the memoirs of a contemporary American teacher: "An hour spent by the teacher in the classroom — keeping order among the pupils, drilling them, and enduring their coarseness — equals three hours of office work."

There is, however, one position that can tempt the teacher: to hold one of those university chairs that allow their occupant to devote himself entirely to scholarly research and to preparing the lectures that form the nucleus of books and learned works. Such a position may exist among us, but only, I believe, in a truncated form.

As for the remedy for the teacher's condition, I summarize it as follows:

First: the establishment of sufficient institutes for training men and women teachers, some for higher instruction and others for primary. Teaching would then become a respected profession requiring preparation, and its road would be barred to the amateurs who resort to it when all other doors of employment are closed in their faces.

Second: the launching of a reform movement of broad scope in our schools — a reform that would take up the overloaded curricula which exhaust pupil and teacher alike, put an end to sectarian and political partisanship, institute real rather than nominal inspection and supervision over schools of divergent tendencies, raise the teacher's standing, and remove the incompetent from the institutes of instruction.

And while I counsel the teacher to be patient and to await the mending of his condition, I warn him against two things:

First, that the profession should get the mastery of him and its disease take possession of him, so that he thinks himself a teacher at all times and takes to advising, guiding, and disputing whenever he finds himself in a gathering of people. Oscar Wilde, whenever he saw a teacher, would flee from him, calling on God for refuge, for fear the man would deliver him a sermon.

Second, that ill-humor and shortness of temper should overcome him from the strain his nerves suffer in the classrooms. The cure for this, perhaps, is to divert himself with some of the arts in his hours of leisure, to keep up his reading, and to mix much with people, lest he be overtaken by the stagnation that threatens those given over to mechanical work — this on condition that he have courage enough to demand that his working hours be so limited as to allow him a measure of leisure.