The Anchored Podcast

An Introduction to Teacher in America

Mar 29, 2023

I am very grateful to have been invited on the Classic Learning Test’s Anchored Podcast recently to talk about hybrid schools. Listen here. I hope you will listen, so I won’t summarize our talk here. I thought it was great; hopefully people will find it useful.

On the podcast, I mentioned the 1945 book Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun. It’s not a perfect fit for classical school teachers, and it’s not a perfect fit for most conventional school teachers either, but I do think it is a book that should be *much* more widely assigned, or at least excerpted, early on in teacher preparation programs of most kinds. I want to share just a few of the passages that I really liked and that I think are worth consideration by lots of teachers and school leaders.

First, here is one Barzun wrote about the book itself:

“I have been told a good many times by different persons that the reading of this book helped determine their choice of teaching as a career. On hearing this I always express regret – not because I believe the life of teaching a misfortune, but because it is an unnatural life. Again like governing, teaching is telling somebody else how to think and behave; it is an imposition, an invasion of privacy. That it is presumably for another’s benefit does not change the unhappy fact of going against another’s desire – to play, whistle, or talk instead of listening and learning: teaching is a blessing thoroughly disguised.”

This one alone has a lot to say to prospective teachers and to experienced ones. Who hasn’t thought of it as an “unnatural life” in some ways, even after spending years and years on a school schedule? Who hasn’t thought of it as a “thoroughly disguised” blessing? Of course some days it feels like a blessing, but even when you’re aware of that, on other days it can feel thoroughly, thoroughly disguised.

This second passage may be especially resonant with people involved in startup schools:

“…For this purpose no school or college or university is ever just right; it is only by the constant effort of its teachers that it can even be called satisfactory. For a school is the junior form of a government and a government is never good, though one may be better than the rest. The reason is the same in both cases: the system must create – not by force and not by bribes – some measure of common understanding and common action in the teeth of endless diversity. A government deals mainly with divergent wills, a school with divergent minds…And just as there are few statesmen or good politicians who can govern, so there are few true teachers and no multitude of passable ones.”

Startup leaders will nod their heads in agreement that they had not found a school that was “just right,” which is at least part of the reason they start their own. And they will understand that our current, conventional system operates mostly “by force” and “by bribes,” but that they, as members of an increasingly open market in education, can’t do that. They have to convince people that what they’re offering is good. Not only that it’s good, but that it’s good enough for other people’s children!

Here is a bit that people involved in new schools will recognize, or should:

“Without question a young man who is not a radical about something is a pretty poor risk for education.”

Is this not a problem that schools are facing even more than they did in the past?

Yes, this guy existed in the past:

And so did this one:

But I submit that it’s getting harder and harder to get students to actually be interested in some particular topic or skill. Yes, there are plenty of kids who are into some kind of tech but it definitely feels like, on average, schools are struggling with…call it engagement, or inspiration, or wonder. This is where a lot of hybrid and microschools can add even more value. By giving students the attention they need to find something to be a “radical” about. It’s become too easy in large, impersonal institutions, to just hide on phones and never really launch. Kids are told to get ready for a job, or just set adrift to “find their passions,” when they could more profitably guided toward healthy things to like, and supported to be good at those things, first. But schools have to know those students to be able to offer this guidance, and that is, again, something hybrid and microschools can offer better than some others. Not driving or working, not being interested in anything…these are bad outcomes for students, and portend bad things for our shared future.

So how can schools address this? Barzun suggests:

“What any boy needs most to be told is that he is not alone in his distress; that cases similar to his are known to history, and that the victims have lived to tell the tale.”

Yes! Absolutely modern society has problems, and modern problems require modern solutions; social media can connect people, Google can tell a person a lot about whatever their problems are, and ChatGPT can tell them even more. But that is more like just sharing problems with peers. (And: This is one place where the decline in reading/its replacement with technology really hurts. We have plenty of deep stories exploring all kinds of problems and offering ways “victims have lived to tell the tale.” ChatGPT is just searching through all of those and rearranging them, sometimes incoherently. The original versions have lasted).

I’ll revisit Teacher in America again because there is just so much interesting and under-discussed content there, but I will end now with two more short bits: