Teaching is a wonder and a mystery; I do not think that much of use can be said about it in general. Still, I surely am a teacher, and ought to be able to give some account of that. Ever since I was a junior high school tutor, I seem to have turned every situation into a teaching opportunity. I teach undergraduates and graduates, in class and elsewhere; I teach teaching assistants how to teach; I try to teach my colleagues, my friends, and sometimes even the public.

For me, teaching means facilitating growth: removing the obstacles to learning and to thinking. Aristotle said, "Among human pleasures, that of learning is the keenest, not only to the scholarly but to the rest of mankind as well." And Aristotle was no ivory-tower recluse: he was wealthy and well traveled, moved among the great and powerful of his time, was married, had mistresses, begat children. He must have known something about pleasures. Obviously he couldn't have been talking about what goes on in "your typical, average classroom," but must have meant something else, something like: playfulness, curiosity, discovering and developing and one's powers, exploring the world.

Small children are alert, curious, eager to investigate, playful. By the time they get to the university far too many of them doubt their own capacity to think, and see no connection between education and their real desires and fears. That is a calamity. The job of a teacher is to undo it (or earlier, to prevent it). Teaching is like bridge building. What is to be taught must somehow connect with what already matters to the student, yet of course something new must be learned.

It seems to me that most of our students today are not really on good terms with their own intellects, experience them almost as alien implants by which The System seeks to control them. There is good reason for them to feel that way, too. Our society claims to be "open," many think "permissive," but in fact it requires much self-imposed blindness, much hypocrisy and denial. Many thoughts are blocked, many questions discouraged. In teaching, I try to give students back their brains as their own.

Not that education is therapy, or that the subject matter is irrelevant to the process. On the contrary, the subject matter is crucial. The relationship between teacher and students is mediated by the world; what a teacher offers is better access to reality, more accurate perception, more effective action, in relation to things that are objectively threatening or pleasurable.

Teaching also always involves authority. But authority is not authoritarianism; authority rests on consent, freely given. Teacher and student are not equals; yet they relate in mutuality. Undertaking to teach means promising that you know something worth knowing, and are something worth being. In presenting knowledge you inevitably also present yourself, as model and as guarantor of the future. The teacher promises: come with me, and you will be able to do this, you will become something like this .

That means the teacher must really be there for the students, must really listen, and take responsibility for the authority exercised. If you listen, you learn from your students, too; teaching feeds research. But the true rewards, the point of it all, are those moments of insight when a student suddenly brightens with radiant excitement and says, "Oh, now I get it!" and does get something to which access had been blocked. A small miracle.

Revised: 1993