discussion

WHY SHOULD I BE A TEACHER?

• Professor Elliot Eisner (2006, 44) announces in a recent article in Educational Leadership that, “Each year, thousands of new teachers enter the field. Almost all seek deep satisfaction from the processes of teaching. Among the many satisfactions that exist, I would like to describe six.” I appreciate his summary, though I have my doubts as to its relevance. His article offers a standard, idealized menu of some positive aspects of the teaching profession, but does not address the daily realities which teachers in the field regularly confront. That is, to my mind Eisner’s list appeals to the rewards of teaching reflected upon in moments of tranquility after a lifetime in the classroom, but suggests after a lifetime in the classroom none of the profession’s difficulties daily experienced there. Eisner’s list might lead the reader to believe that if the teacher does not experience the same satisfactions in the classroom as he, then s/he has only herself to blame. “How we teach,” Eisner writes, “is related to achieving the deep satisfactions of teaching” (46). In the schools towards which Eisner’s list points—schools of quality and higher socio-economic status, schools like Stanford University—the good teacher would have to be supremely incompetent not to be satisfied. But Eisner’s list actually offers me no more information about why we teach than when I ask my doctor why he studied medicine to become a physician, and he answers, “To help people!” According to Eisner, teaching allows him to participate in the world of great ideas, to realize a form of immortality, and to enact performance, or as Eisner describes it, “to play your own cello” (44). Teaching, Eisner continues, provides opportunities to create and participate in forms of aesthetic experience, to experience and represent a passion for learning, and finally, to make a difference in students’ lives. These are all admirable explanations for a commitment to the teaching profession, and I have every reason to believe that Eisner participates passionately in the profession for each of the reasons he enthusiastically offers. Of course, it strikes me now (as it does, actually, at other times as well) that the ends of teaching ought to enable everyone to experience in her own life regardless of profession the joys Eisner ascribes to teaching.. Not that everyone must become a teacher, mind you; rather, I consider that what we actually do in the classroom is to enact our daily joys which include, but are not limited to, the six satisfactions of teaching that Eisner names, in the hopes that others will come to experience in their own lives the satisfactions Eisner attributes to teaching. Perhaps this goal ought to serve as the purpose of our content which must be not, therefore, vocation-specific. Dewey (1964, 248) writes, Ultimately, the question of values and a standard of values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of life. Educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools, materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and richness of experience. How shall we secure breadth of outlook without sacrificing efficiency of execution? How shall we secure the diversity of interests, without paying the price of isolation? How shall the individual be rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the cost of his intelligence. How shall art, science, and politics reenforce one another in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends pursued at one another’s expense? How can the interests of life and the studies which enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead of dividing men from one another.

Were education to be organized around these criteria, then everyone, I think, should realize in her profession (and life!) the satisfactions Eisner derives from teaching. Ironically, then, it is ourselves as teachers that we offer as curriculum, though in the current political climate, it is not safe to acknowledge (or be!) this in public. Indeed, many of us even in private suppress such awarenesses. And besides, how will we test this?

• Nevertheless, I acknowledge that I do not know anywhere a better publicized list defining a commitment to teaching and learning and living. Certainly, Eisner’s accounting defines the rationale with which I have explained the thirty-five years of my teaching career in the public schools and public universities in the United States. And now, as the sun sets on my classrooms, I am reexamining each of Eisner’s explanations. Rather, I am experiencing a failure to understand exactly what Eisner might have meant—what I have over the years might have meant— by each ‘satisfaction’ of teaching, and I experience a desire to understand what I have been doing for the past thirty-five years. And I desire in this sunset to experience, perhaps, a purer and brighter light than I saw when the sun rose. For me now, the items on Eisner’s list represent an ex post facto explanation derived from a lifetime in the classroom, and do not necessarily serve to encourage any person to enter the profession except in some idealized fashion. And when I query my students about their motives for becoming a teacher, the only one they voice that approaches an item on Eisner’s list concerns the last one: making a difference in student’s lives. However, not a single student can define with much precision what that desire might mean. Indeed, when I probe their response just a bit further, it seems that my students’ desire to enter the profession is often in the service of repairing the damage done to them by teachers. I am alarmed to consider that I am yet teacher to them, and I am presently alarmed that my satisfactions in the classroom might be achieved in their silence nd even oppression. And it strikes me that in their desire to be teachers, they want to be that for which they have no model, and they must if they are to succeed as teachers inevitably strike out on their own. Thoreau (2001, 226) writes, “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” I would have my students take that walk, but in their classes, these students are learning to follow straight-cut paths, state mandates, guidelines and practices, and are forever denied their own practice. I think, contra Eisner, that we are training our teachers to be faithful slaves. “Academies,” Spinoza (2005, 369) writes, “that are founded at the public expense, are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them..” By the measure of our schools, we are not so free, and the satisfactions that Eisner describes will not be available to future teachers. My students are not free enough to be saunterers. Or sometimes my students express in their desire to be teachers the wish to be just like their teacher in elementary school or high school, in which case, they desire to become someone else and will not learn to be themselves in the classroom. That way madness lies; the pedagogy here is antithetical to the realization of any of Eisner’s satisfactions. Thoreau writes in his journal (31 December 1859): How vain it is to teach youth, or anybody, truths! They can learn them after their own fashion, and when they are ready. I do not mean by this to condemn our system of education, but to show what it amounts to. A hundred boys at college are drilled in physics and metaphysics, languages, etc. There may be one or two in each hundred, prematurely old perchance, who approaches the subject from a similar point of view to his teachers, but as for the rest, and most promising, it is like agricultural chemistry to so many Indians. They get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. They at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they should ever want to use any of its weapons (italics in original).

My students seek my truths rather than seek their own. They would be teachers who have not learned how to learn. I sometimes point this paradox out to my students, but they do not attend to me. They want to know what they have to do to get an ‘A’ in the course.

• In the very same issue of Educational Leadership , Scott Mandel (2006, 66) writes that too many teachers are leaving the profession after their first year in the classroom because of the stresses they suffer there. If Elliot Eisner (2006, 44) announces in his piece in Educational Leadership that, “Each year, thousands of new teachers enter the field,” Scott Mandel charges that one-third of all first-year teachers leave the profession at the end of the school term. “New teachers,” Mandel writes, “have one basic goal in mind—survival.” As my grandmother might say, “Hoo! hah!” These first year teachers, at least, will never have the opportunity to realize the satisfactions Eisner lists as the rewards of the teaching profession—great ideas, immortality, performance, artistry, a passion for learning, and making a difference. Indeed, I suspect that these first year teachers can not even anticipate ever realizing these pleasures, and that is why they exit the profession. Of course, even seasoned teachers often name survival as their primary desire, and though they maintain fantasies of realizing the satisfactions Eisner heralds for the classroom, too often they realize frustration and pain. In 1999, I returned to the middle school classroom. In the Fall of that year I worked for three months teaching Social Studies—American History—in the Twin Cities Jewish Middle School of St. Paul, Minnesota. It was the most difficult work I had done in years. For almost two decades I had been an English teacher (perhaps experiencing the rewards Eisner names, but not consciously thinking of my rewards), and for the last decade, I had immersed myself in curriculum theorizing; I wrote voluminously and extensively about the desperate need to rethink educational practices in our schools. In the present instance, I wanted very much to help these Middle School students begin to think like an historian, a term I defined as someone who always knows that there is another story yet to be told. I wanted to use the discourses of popular culture—folk song and original source material—to give expression to the silenced voices in American history and to interrogate some of the stories to which students already gave credence. I wanted learning to be challenging, fun and, well, empowering. I mean, in the words of Henry Giroux, I wanted to “resurrect traditions and social memories that provide a new way of reading history and reclaiming power and identity . . . creating new languages and social practices that connect rather than separate education and cultural work from every day life.” I mean, I wanted to change the world. And how should I presume? I miserably failed; I failed miserably. In one class studied Rashid, a highly motivated sensitive young man who actually said, “I enjoy studying with you,” and in that same class, studied also his sister, Phyllis, who could joyously miss days of school on end, and then not understand why she was unaware what topic we were at present discussing. Amir completed two books before his sister picked up her first. In one class sat William, an intelligent and involved student who suffered from epilepsy and was scheduled at the Mayo clinic for delicate brain surgery to relieve his symptoms; and sat also Rochelle whose mother has been recently institutionalized and whose younger brother’s behavior was so extreme that the family was having difficulty placing him in any school at all. How shall I consider these students’ homeworks turned in late, and to my mind, carelessly prepared? In one class sat Martha Will about whom I wrote, “Martha is highly distractable. The demands of her social life seem to be a priority,” and in that same class sat also Sophia Ginzburg, about whom I wrote, “Every teacher deserves a student such as Sophie. Her powerful intellect and imagination stimulate and challenge.” How shall I speak to both at once? Or even separately? In one class was Richard Overby about whom I wrote, “Richard has a very difficult time in class. He does not seem to have a sense of inner control and is disruptive and highly distracted;” and Jamie Key, about whom I wrote, “Jamie is one of the most delightful students I have known. Though quiet, she is an enthusiastic learner . . . Her writing displays a sophistication special to middle school experience.” Is it American history that would benefit Richard now or a sense of inner control? Is it a lesson in history or a warm heart that might comfort Rochelle? How do I begin to address the concerns of both children–and that of the fifteen other children in the class and satisfy my own beliefs and practices concerning the American history classroom I imagined. I sit here now recollecting emotion in moments of tranquility and wonder incredulously how I could have ever believed that I might have succeeded! Or that my success would have been so evident that even I would have been pleased? And if I was pleased, perhaps it was me of whom I was originally thinking: violence, I recall, is to act as if I were alone to act!! How could I expect that all of these student should all feel the same about school at the same moment as that moment of the class in which I was then teaching? And that somehow these students would be intrigued to exactly the same degree and coincident with the present material as I had offered.. How could I expect that all of these students would be willing to learn with me or from me? What was Hecuba to them or they to Hecuba that they would weep for her? What right did I have to demand very much intellectual struggle from them when for many just getting to school was an achievement far in excess of my seventy mile drive! How could I have expected all of these students to be like me in my idealism and occupy my idealistic image? Transform society? Ha! Each and every day I was overwhelmed by the insurmountable effects of society upon these children. These were mostly privileged children whose parents could afford tuition to a private school–but their situations were obviously influenced by the personal and family psychological situations and conditions which I could not even attempt to make sense of, much less begin to relieve. Tolstoy had said that all happy families were alike, but that every unhappy family is unique. He was wrong: every happiness, too, is different. Weren’t Rashid and his sister both seemingly happy and yet the product of the same home? Or shall I abandon all belief in happiness and assume it to be yet another social mask? There was something intrinsically wrong with the whole notion of the classroom as it architecturally, structurally, socially, intellectually and academically existed. How could I possibly deal with all of these personalities and still engage in American history learning? There were days when all I wanted to do was to teach these children some sense of inner control. There were days when all I wanted was to get out of there alive. Oh, do not mistake me, I wanted them to learn some American history, I wanted their stories to assume rightful places in their lives and add to the discourses of American history; I wanted their stories to intervene in the monolithic American legend. I wanted to be a great teacher. How could I presume? How many eyes must one man have before he can see people cry? I have rarely felt as isolated in a classroom as I did during those months. What influence I might have had very little to do with what I taught. In that classroom I experienced at various times each of the joys Eisner lists as motives for teaching, but, too, often it was survival I sought. And the road was so long and hard. I was not even a first year teacher.

  • Henry Giroux calls teachers cultural workers; as such, they must discover the local custom because for the most part, as James McMurty sings, “I’m not from here, I just live here.” Giroux valorizes this aspect of the pedagogical encounter as border crossings. And how should I presume? I wonder, what serves as my passport? Aren’t border crossings also interpretable as trespassing? Woody Guthrie laments that those who cross may be known by no names, except ‘deportees.’

  I think the classroom is a very difficult place in which to reside, and the physical, intellectual and psychological demands it makes on the teacher are wholly underestimated, if not completely ignored. Certainly, they are not evident in Eisner’s paean to the profession. His classes, to a large extent, are all elective, and at the graduate level: I do not have a sense what his response might be if one (or no one!) in his class was interested in the great ideas. The tensions that arise between the discrepancy of what I say in the classroom and what I do in it, between what I intend to say and what is actually said in the classroom, the conflict between teaching to live and living to teach, the split between content and context, trouble my rest and disturb my practice. Rabbi Ishmael said that ”One who learns in order to teach is afforded the opportunity to learn and to teach. Whereas one who learns in order to practice is afforded the opportunity to learn, to teach, to observe, and to practice.” But what that practice means with regard to teaching is problematic: the state mandates the script, and the textbooks the texts. To practice becomes recitation, and to learn merely imitation. I teach now in a school which educates teachers: students demand that I teach them “how to teach.” Tell me what to do, they plead, and we will do it. Just please, give us direction.” I wonder if I am educating my students to teach or to practice. If the former, I teach a craft, but if the latter, I offer a vision, an art, a way of life. I think there are no set rules for such practice that I could transmit, and I seem doomed to a palpable failure which belies Eisner’s satisfactions. Rabbi Ishmael’s statement suggests a qualitative difference between learning to teach and learning to practice, and Dewey teaches me that this dualism must be exploded if I am to proceed in either teaching, practice, observing and learning. I would stand with Dewey and Rabbi Ishmael. To resolve this dualism is to stand confident in the world and in the classroom. I think that what I have always sought in the classroom is ethics and not pedagogy, but that word does not appear on Eisner’s list. Eisner’s listing does not account for my experience in that middle school class, nor the ethics I seek. Eisner’s list does not speak to the experience of those first year teachers who leave after their initial year in the classroom, not to the fifty percent of teachers who exit the profession within the first five years of their careers. Eisner’s list does not address basic issues of survival. I wonder how one might teach survival, and by what measure these skills might be assessed. Perhaps survival is already a form of art and immortality. In his essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau (2001, 225) announces: “I want to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister, the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.” The rhetoric of the school-committees—national, state and local—have much to say for civilization, or at least, for their version of it. They have over the years defined what knowledge is of most worth and mandated its transmission. In the service to the state, teachers have been transformed into marionettes at the least, and slaves at the worse: it is not inopportune to recall here that an original meaning of ‘pedagogue’ referred to the slave that walked the child to the school. The satisfactions that Eisner attributes to the teaching profession are no longer available to the teacher because the teacher does not freely practice in the classroom. These committees have transformed the play by demanding that our students “study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in’t” (II, ii, 525-7). This speech serves purposes which the players could never know—indeed, must not know—and over which they have no control. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the players perform before the King, The Murder of Gonzago, the edited drama, they are rightly bewildered, even angered by the audience response to their performance: “Hey, I said what I was told to say! What happened?” So, too, in our classrooms: from the often puzzled, often angry responses of students teachers must wonder, What did I say? Teachers are turned into hired servants. Condemned to speak inadequate ideas, they understand neither the source nor logic of the ideas they deliver, nor do they know those ideas as stemming from their own nature. Teachers are not considered sources of knowledge, but mere transporters of it. They are transformed into the teamsters for the school committees, the minister and other representatives of ‘civilization.’ Nor are teachers able to teach to students the capacity to develop adequate ideas which the teachers are not permitted themselves to develop. Teachers themselves wonder “What did I say?” As Spinoza (1955, 40) argued, in On the Improvement of Understanding, “The ideas which we form as clear and distinct, seem so to follow from the sole necessity of our nature, that they appear to depend absolutely on our sole power; with confused ideas the contrary is the case. They are often formed against our will.” Today, teachers are rendered virtually powerless, and the ideas of the classroom are often not their own. The impositions of standards and mandates defeat the purpose of education. These school committees leave teachers and students with little understanding and control. Interestingly, Eisner concludes with an acknowledgment that “the satisfactions of teaching extend beyond the academic . . . indeed, the most lasting contributions come from saving lives, rescuing a child from despair, restoring a sense of hope, soothing discomfort. We remember these occasions longest because they matter” (46). I do not read anywhere in the standards promulgated by a single state agency an objective which aims to achieve a single one of these most lasting contributions. They have clearly nothing to do with the annual yearly progress of any single school, and because they are immeasurable, also are immaterial. I am myself not inclined to listen to the pratings and beratings of these school committees. The lawyer tells Bartleby that he ought to look at the green grass growing within the prison walls, but Bartleby responds, “I know where I am.” Our school committees tell us we are free and treat us as enslaved; they tell us to speak and give us what to say. But, I know where I am. Here I say, “I want to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister, the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that” (225). And if Thoreau’s extreme statement announced that it was in Wildness that the preservation of the world depended, then I wish to say here that it is in ethics that depends the preservation of pedagogy. And that the six satisfactions of teaching noted by Professor Elliot Eisner depend on the acknowledgment that teaching is a stance taken before the Other, and that everything that occurs in the classroom derives from that ethics. Teaching is a relationship founded on such ethics, and the satisfactions of teaching are the realization of an ethical stance. I would like to study the classroom from the basic question addressed by Eisner’s piece: what are the ethics of the classroom that has impelled me to be a teacher, and to teach others to enter the teaching profession?

✡

• But perhaps I might start with the negative image of Eisner’s positive; let me note a few factors of the teaching profession which would deter satisfaction in it.

  Why should I teach? Eisner, a full professor at Stanford does not mention money as a factor for choosing the teaching profession, and I presume he earns a salary far in excess of the majority of teachers in the United States today. Indeed, many of those who drop out of teaching do so because of the lack of adequate pay. The AFT teacher salary survey (http://www.aft.org/salary/index.htm) found that the average teacher salary in the 2003-04 school year was $46,597, a 2.2 percent increase from the year before. However, even with the increase, teacher salaries fell short of the 2.7 percent rate of inflation for 2004. Interestingly enough, the United States Census Bureau (http://www.alaska.edu/swoir/surveys/index_docs/incomechart.pdf) reports that the average family income in 2001 based in the educational attainment of the householder was $110,000 dollar for those with a masters degree. Half of all public school teachers have earned this degree. Nonetheless, their salaries in 2005 fall well below the average for wage earners of comparable educational attainment. In addition, many states are attempting to drastically reduce or eliminate pension and healthcare benefits, which were once negotiated as part of teacher compensation. Furthermore, in many states, teacher strikes are illegal, and thus teachers are powerless to affect their own salary levels. As for myself, the pay is generally abominable, though certainly serviceable. For myself, I make a sufficient salary, though some might think me extravagant. Then again, I have two teen-aged daughters who love to shop, and I appreciate the spending of money myself. I used to feel quite guilty about my economy, but Max Horkheimer suggests that consumption, albeit conspicuous, can be understood as a revolt against the American Puritan strain of asceticism and denial. It comforts me to know that when I saunter through the Mall of America I am striking out against the ethics of sombreness and austerity prevalent in our own home-grown Calvinism. And though I don’t own a Lexus, I can afford to change the muffler every so often and drive quietly down the streets of my home town, silently subverting the zeitgeist. I do not teach for the money. Once, Rabbi Hayyim of Krosno, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov’s, was watching together with his disciples a tight rope walker. He seemed so absorbed in the spectacle that his students asked him what it was that riveted his gaze to this somewhat senseless performance. “This man,” Rabbi Hayyim responded, “is risking his life, and I cannot say why. But I am quite sure that while he is walking the rope, he is not thinking of the fact that he is earning a hundred gulden by what he is doing, for if he did, he would fall” (Buber, I, 174). Perhaps if I thought about the money I would not teach; perhaps if I thought about the money, I could not teach. And of course, there isn’t that much money of which to speak. Why should I teach? Certainly it is not for the status that attaches to the profession. Daily I read of my incompetence and that of my colleagues, and daily I am subject to the whims and whimsies of our politicians who would transfer all of their incompetence over to us. If I were to believe even half of what they say about us, I would on most days call in sick, for indeed, that is what they say I am. William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, in a speech in 2000 honoring the Heritage Foundation said that “In America today, the longer kids stay in school the dumber they get relative to students in other industrialized countries” (Bracey, 67). I and my colleagues are Bennett’s target. As my grandmother might say, “Vey iz mir!” Gerald Bracey writes that “Our schools have been assailed decade after decade . . . many within the field of education have shown minimal support for public schools” (2003, 106). We are a beleaguered population beset upon by hostile forces. We are constantly wrong and in need of correction. A state official, who should be serving the teaching professional by asking what he might do to enhance our work, rather than assuming our incompetence by directing its practice, spoke at a meeting outlining yet another set of newly mandated state revisions of the teacher education programs to which we are regularly subject. I asked him what evidence existed that previous to these newly promulgated programs we had not been doing our work with good results. He stuttered and blustered, and ignored me. We had been doing our work with good results, but without these new mandates how would the bureaucrats justify their own positions? When Rabbi Levi Yitzhak became the Rav in Berditchev, he made an agreement with the town leaders that they were not to ask him to their meetings unless they intended to discuss the introduction of a new usage or a new procedure. One day, they invited him to a meeting, and Rabbi Levi Yitzhah arrived expectantly. “And what is your new procedure or usage?” he asked. And the leaders described the institution of the tzedakah box into which the rich would put monies for the sake of the poor. When he heard what they had instituted, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak scolded them saying, “Did I not tell you not to take me away from my studies for the sake of an old procedure or usage.” But the leaders protested that they had, indeed, invented something wholly new. And Rabbi Levi Yitzhah reminded them that the practice of not looking the needy in the face was as old as Sodom, where a young girl was punished for handing a beggar a piece of bread face to face instead of placing that bread in the charity box. The revisions in our program were arduously made and kept us from our studies. In the newspapers they still condemn our practice. Why should I teach? Eisner says that to teach is to make a difference. Eisner says that immortality is the teacher’s reward: “living in the memories of our students is no meager accomplishment” (44). Perhaps this may be so, but as teachers we have no control over the character and quality of those memories, and as our standards-based curriculum comes to dominate our pedagogy, the distinction between one teacher and the next disappears. My friends tell me that to teach is to touch minds, to teach is to change lives, to teach is to stimulate thought and be open to the ideas of our students. It is true that students have been effected by my pedagogy; I have met them on the streets and received communication from them after long absences and silences. Some of them I could not tolerate when we shared the classroom. Some of them remember a completely different classroom and pedagogy. I knew not what I did. Immortality, of which I must have a great deal more to say, is a dubious satisfaction: it exists only in my hope and is almost wholly unrealizable. Of course, on the doctoral level, or at what are called ‘the elite schools,’ of which Stanford is certainly one, this relationship between teacher and student, and the possibility of making differences may be much more palpable and immediate; our students there regularly sit in our offices, meet with us for coffee and conversation, come to our homes for dinners and soirées. There, our graduate (and even undergraduate) students join us by choice, though they do not always choose us. They sit in our classrooms and at least pretend to attend. We swim in the heady world of meaning. A story has been told: It has been said that John Dewey would lecture while staring out of the classroom window overlooking the campus and surroundings of Teachers College. At the hour’s end he would turn to the class and say, “Thank you all. I think everything is a bit clearer now!” In this tale, students go off to discuss, to ponder, to question the matter of that classroom, and John Dewey goes back to his study to continue his work. Or he returns to his office to meet with interested students. But there are too few of us privileged to teach these students. Here, in the public elementary and secondary schools, there are presently fifty million students and they attend not by choice but by law. In the public schools, at the hour’s end, teachers and students head off to the next class amidst great noise and clatter and confusion, and the heady world of ideas falls, like Icarus in Breughel’s famous painting, fatally, unnoticed and without concern. Indeed, classroom management procedures which we are urged to inculcate in our teacher education students warn against just such teacher inattention enjoyed by John Dewey. He would effect education—indeed, there are few I know of greater influence than he—but in that classroom he seems unconcerned with affecting students. Many of us, however, work in the public schools—there are six million teachers in the United States—and I think that if each of us touched only a single mind, how might the world not be changed! Alas, I see little evidence of that now, but regardless of the charges, we are not blameworthy. My students tend to just sit there and wait for my pronouncements because they are terrified of the classrooms where we, who are daily judged, sit in judgement on them. They are terrified students. They will enter classrooms filled with terrified students. I would not learn their terror. The Rabbis say, “One who learns from the young, to what can he be compared? To one who eats grapes that are tart, and drinks wine straight from the vat. But one who learns from the old, to what can he be compared? To one who eats grapes that are ripe, and drinks wine that is aged” (Pirke Avot, 4:26). Alas, I have eaten too many tart grapes, and drunk too long from the vats. I would sit down with the old. I am myself getting on. Though, of course, I am being just a bit specious and dramatic. As Rabbi Hanina says, “I have learned much from my teachers, and from my colleagues more than from my teachers, and from my students more than from all of them.” I remember once a student approached me after class somewhat apologetically. He shifted his slide room back to his left side, and said he had a favor to request. It seems his application for the Westinghouse Science Scholarship was in the typewriter, and if he removed the paper to type up his paper for my class he would never be able to realign the original page for the scholarship to continue typing it. He requested an extension on the paper that I had assigned. These were the days before computers, and even in wealthy Great Neck, most homes had only one typewriter. I asked him what his Westinghouse paper was about; he proceeded to name the title, and I knew immediately that I didn’t have the slightest idea about what he was talking. I probably could have learned a great deal then, but I had to get to my next class in a classroom three halls down. I agreed, of course, to the extension he requested. I do not think he won the award, but he did get an ‘A’ on the paper. I drank to his success from the vat. The problem remains that in the present climate little learning can take place. Students wait patiently for the information I am required to deliver, and patiently, I await the return of that information on the standardized and requisite exams. I am told that each student must write a philosophy of education, but when I ask whether students will be required to take a philosophy course so that they might understand what philosophy is about, I am answered that there is no time for such nonsense. There are classrooms that require management! Students desire only to know what will be on the test, because in the present climate only that which is on the test counts as knowledge. What I learn from my students today is how educational policy today crushes the desire for learning. Why should I teach? Eisner suggests that to teach is to engage in the world of great ideas. This smacks to me of Socrates’ marketplace, where the wise man stood so engrossed in thought that he did not move. His students’ gathered about him. My students move at the clanging of the bell. They come late to class unprepared. They ask what will be on the test.

Eliot Eisner (2006) says that one of the satisfactions of teaching rests in the ability to introduce to students great ideas on which they may reflect for the rest of their lives. Eisner writes that “Great teaching traffics in enduring puzzlements, persistent dilemmas, complex conundrums, enigmatic paradoxes” (44). Great teaching eschews the answer. Eisner exclaims, “Questions invite you in. They stimulate possibilities. They give you a ride. And the best ones are those that tickle the intellect and resist resolution” (44). But the current ideological climate mandates a curriculum which is materially assessable. There must be only certainty in this teaching. Today, in our classrooms, curriculum standards ensure that we have little opportunity to travel on the heady highway of ideas or to revel in the question. In fact, it is the answer upon which we insist, and we punish the question. If, as Eisner insists, great teaching pursues the question, then in schools today we remain quite sedentary. “I have met with but one or two persons,” Thoreau bemoans, “in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks . . .” (2001, 235). Thoreau assumes that those who do not walk have already taken to their beds; they do not saunter. Our classrooms are too often filled with those asleep.

• It is flattering to assume that the ideas I transmit are great ideas, but it is hubris to think that I convey to students those ideas. One of Spinoza’s admirers, and perhaps a student of his, writes him: “Even as formerly I admire you for the subtlety and keenness of your natural gifts, so now do I bewail and deplore you . . . Will you, wretched pigmy, vile worm of the earth, yea, ashes, food of worms, will you in your unspeakable blasphemy, dare to put yourself before the incarnate, infinite wisdom of the Eternal Father?”(1955, 410, 413). Love? His affections do not this way tend. No doubt Spinoza thought that he had trafficked in great ideas, even walked with his companion out of the village and into the woods; indeed, even dear Alfred seemed to have recognized his sauntering in the heady world of Spinoza’s ideas. But the walk had come to a crushing halt, and Spinoza’s companion became a dangerous stalker. Spinoza addresses Albert calmly but with alarm when he regrets that his student has apparently abandoned everything he has previously learned and accepted. “I have thus been induced to write you this short reply, which I earnestly beg you will think worthy of calm perusal” (1955, 415). Alas, it must be terribly frustrating to discover that our students have chosen a walk which contradicts everything in which we believe, by which we live, and about which we thought we have taught. It is small comfort, very small comfort indeed, to consider that our students know enough to reject us, and it is no comfort to know that they have rejected us to choose exactly that which is diametrically opposed to everything for which we stand, to opt for what Spinoza calls “superstition.” As the poet so clearly stated, “There is no joy in Mudville, Mighty Casey has struck out!”

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• Well, perhaps, I teach for the learning. But what learning might mean is not an uncontentious issue. A story is told: In the dark, stuffiness of the cheder, the Rabbi stands before the class of children. The youthful charges, some not more than five or six, sit on the benches with their feet dangling several inches from the floor. The Rabbi is tall and his beard is wild and flowing. He wears the traditional garb: black trousers and what seems to be a permanently soiled white shirt, black coat which flies up behind him as he paces back and forth before the students, and a black kippah (skullcap). Thee students sit silently, expectantly and terrified. He stares at his charges and in a stern voice asks, “Class, can any one tell me why the first book of the Bible, Bereshit,[,harc] begins with the letter gimel [d]” Confused and panicked, not a child moves, nor offers a response. Each sits with his head down trying desperately to avoid notice. “Well,” the Rabbi thunders, “can anyone tell me why the first book of the Bible, Bereshit, begins with the letter gimel?” He stares with wild, almost crazed eyes at the frightened children sitting quaking in their seats. The silence roars. “Can no one give me an answer?” the Rabbi roars. Suddenly, from the back of the room a hand goes up. “Yes,” the Rabbi says, “can you please tell me why the first book of the Bible, Bereshit, begins with the letter gimel?” In a hushed and tentative voice, the child responds, “But Rabbi, the first book of the Bible doesn’t begin with the letter gimel [d]; it begins with the letter bet [c]” The other children sit horrified and await tremblingly for the wrath of the Rabbi to come down on their poor colleague. The Rabbi stares out at the brave child for another ten seconds, and he says with a soft lilt in his voice, “Well, that’s one answer!”

I love that story. In that bleak and dark classroom, conversation would never end. Yes, I would respond, that is one answer. Can someone offer another? For every answer, another question. There is, of course, a danger for me in that open classroom: If I teach students how to ask questions, then how can I stop them from asking me questions for which I have no answers? How shall I control the classroom when the world might be in there? And if answers are not readily forthcoming, can I consider myself yet a teacher? What should occur in the classroom that learning would take place? What is the learning that must take place in the classroom? What is the motive for a type of learning based in objectives? But no, that is a false questions because I already know the answer. It is the indoctrination which maintains our slavery.

• Present issues of curriculum swirl also about issues of control: control of children, control of knowledge, control of the dreams. Control—that is the only answer in the classrooms of the United States. It is comforting to know exactly what material must be covered; it is satisfying to know the material has been covered. But I am not certain that such teaching involves learning. Couldn’t anyone else do that but me, and leave me in the marketplace with my ideas? Why should I be a teacher? ✡ Perhaps an easier question to consider is: why refuse to be a teacher, to say, as it were, “I prefer not to.” There are at least two interesting historical precedents for such a choice: Baruch de Spinoza and Henry David Thoreau. In a letter dated 16 February, 1673, Lewis Fabritius, Professor of the Academy of Heidelberg, and Councilor of Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine,, wrote to Baruch de Spinoza offering him on behalf of the elector “an ordinary professorship of Philosophy in his illustrious university” (Spinoza, 1955, 373). The invitation seems to have had no foreground: Spinoza had no university experience as either student or teacher, nor had he ever voiced any interest in securing a public professorship. Indeed, following his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam and his remove from that city in 1656, Spinoza had lived a life of relative quiet and seclusion, receiving visitors, but apparently traveling very little, and then only within a small circle in the Netherlands: from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg, then to Voorburg,, and finally to the Hague, where he died in 1677. Giles Deleuze writes (1988, 9), “What defines Spinoza as a traveler is not the distances he covers but rather his inclination to stay in boarding houses, his lack of attachment, of possessions and property, after his renunciation of the paternal inheritance.” Indeed, if Spinoza could be said to be at all a traveler, it was in his mind that he journeyed, and there he appeared to move extensively and continuously. Actually, Spinoza spent most of his days in the sedentary and solitary occupation of grinding lenses, reading, writing and studying, but if he could be said at all to engage in teaching, the claim must be attributed to his apparent sociability. He often received visitors who sought out his conversation, and he generously responded to a wide variety of correspondence from a diverse population concerning his ideas. It seems from the limited correspondence that has survived that Spinoza was a gracious and steady correspondent responding to a great variety of questions. For example, in an extended series of letters, Spinoza engages with Alex Boxel in a spirited discussion concerning the existence of ghosts. As I have come to expect, Spinoza put no stock in either their existence or possibility.

  Spinoza apparently enjoyed a very simple, rather mundane life, ate gruel on most days, drank a little beer and infrequently wine, and he smoked regularly a long-stemmed clay pipe as was the custom in 17th century Holland. His first biographer, Colerus, says of him, “It is scarce credible how sober and frugal he was. Not that he was reduced to great poverty, as not to be able to spend more, if he had been willing. He had friends enough, who offered him their purses, but he was naturally very sober, and would be satisfied with little” (Spinoza, 2005, xviii). Spinoza was not a rich man, and the salary from the teaching position would have permitted him a great deal more in the way of material comforts. Spinoza was, however, wary of such financial ties: Simon Joossten DeVries, a close friend of Spinoza’s, tried to give the philosopher a gift of two thousand florins, “so as to enable him to live more comfortably,” but Spinoza refused to accept it. When DeVries died, he wanted to make Spinoza his sole heir, but Spinoza thought that this would be unfair to DeVries’ brother, and so the brother granted to Spinoza an annual stipend of five hundred guilders. Spinoza thought the figure excessive, and insisted that it be reduced to three hundred guilders. In his biography of Spinoza ,Jean Maximilian Lucas, a French Protestant refugee living in Holland stated that “He cared little for the goods of fortune . . . Not only did riches not tempt him, but he even did not at all fear the odious consequences of poverty” (Nadler, 262). No, it would not be the salary that would induce Spinoza to accept the position.

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• ✡ The offer of an academic position had been made to Spinoza, and the terms appeared ostensibly quite generous. “An annual salary would be paid to you, equal to that enjoyed at present by the ordinary professors. You will hardly find elsewhere a prince more favourable to distinguished talents, among which he reckons yourself. You will have the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching, which the prince is confident you will not misuse, to disturb the religion publicly established.” It took Spinoza a little over one month to graciously refuse the offer. Fabritius’ is a curious caveat, since the very charges leveled at Spinoza accused him of exactly that which in his offer the Elector Palatine expressly forbade: disturbing not only the religion publicly established, but, in fact, condemning all organized religions regardless of establishment. Thus, this particular offer of a professor’s chair to Spinoza by the elector palatine appears disingenuous at the least, and dangerous at best. It seems almost to me as if the offer was intended not to provide Spinoza with a safe and public forum, but to prevent Spinoza from continuing his work. The warning in the offer of the professorship seems a way to silence Spinoza and keep him in check, or better, to get him to do work of which the state approved, an ironic acknowledgment of his ability to influence. Today’s offers of the classroom to teacher-educators seem as specious and dangerous as Fabritius’ offer of an ordinary professorship to Spinoza. The high stakes testing movement, exacerbated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, holds the swords of Damocles over the heads of each and every school teacher in the United States, and threatens each with severe consequences for disturbing the publicly espoused religion. Gerald Bracey writes (2006, 106) that “In the current climate, and under the No Child Left Behind law, teachers and administrators can have their competence judged by test scores and can lose their jobs if the test scores come up short. Under state laws, teachers and administrators might get promoted or terminated because of the test scores.” How this religious principle evolved is not my subject here, though I am not uninterested in this development. What I am interested in, however, is to what extent these caveats deter the best and the brightest from entering and remaining in the profession. Perhaps Spinoza might cast some light on it. In the Tractatus Spinoza says (2005, 206), “Action in obedience to orders does take away freedom in a certain sense, but it does not therefore, make a man a slave, all depends on the object of the action. If the object of the action be the good of the state, and not the good of the agent, the latter is a slave and does himself no good.” As Hamlet says, “That would be scanned.” If the state mandates that every child will take a test every year to measure the degree of her learning, then it is clear that the state also mandates that every teacher prepare students to take the test by teaching the materials that will be tested. The curriculum must focus on those materials so that the child’s annual yearly progress may be properly measured. The sum total of the annual yearly progress of the students in a particular school measures the annual yearly progress of the school, measures the educational value of that school. Measures the competence of the teachers in that school. No other contingent factor in considering a school’s work may be taken into account outside the absolute numbers on the tests. Any curricular matters which do not address standards to be tested are deemed irrelevant, and any teacher who neglects these standards is incompetent. It is clear that the teacher is not free to do anything other than what the state mandates. The teacher, far from having the freedom of action, becomes the state’s slave. The teacher, far from having the opportunity to traffic in enduring puzzlements, etc., must wallow in the swamps of facts and numbers and tests. Who would such fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life? If, as Mary Poppins says, a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, then in this system the teachers are now defined as the bearers of, even identified sometimes as the substances of such sweetness, as to ensure the ingestion of the medicine. Or not, as the case may be. But regardless of point of view, whether the teachers bear sweetness or acerbity, deliver the medicine they must. Little children who get caught out in a rainstorm without wearing their galoshes, Mary Poppins warns, must take their medicine. Certainly there is some benefit if your nanny can make the medicine taste like, say, strawberry soda; nonetheless, the state mandate insists that for the child’s own good the medicine must be taken. The state has determined what knowledge is of most worth, and teachers must teach this material even as students must learn it. The state has turned teachers and students into slaves in the excesses of its own grasping for power. There is nothing about the testing which is good for the teacher: the teacher is a slave. Rather, it is the state bureaucracy in its voluble attack on the educational system, its charge of teacher incompetence, and its assumption of total control over the schools and the teacher’s autonomy, which benefits from these actions. In the control of the educational apparatus, the state asserts its control over the future and the past. As Hamlet says, “Let me not think upon’t.” Spinoza says that regardless whether “the act is done out of love or fear . . . every action which a subject performs in accordance with the commands of the sovereign, whether such action springs from love, or fear, or (as is more frequently the case) from hope and fear together, or from reverence compounded of fear and admiration, or, indeed, any motive whatever, is performed in virtue of his submission to the sovereign, and not in virtue of his own authority” (2001, 215). Thus, every teacher is transformed into a slave, and her work reduced to coercive labor. Spinoza suggests that the teacher must consider herself so competent that her decisions in the classroom derive from her own expert reason and depend on no external authority other than her reason. It is on this authority that Spinoza would say (2003, 369) that anyone who wishes to teach should be permitted to do so, provided they are prepared to assume her own cost and risk! Alas, today, there is no motive for choosing teaching or the teacher’s role. But it is not just the teacher whom the state enslaves. The high stakes testing has ensured that the child will learn only what the state requires to be learned for the good of the state, and for the sake of indoctrination denies to the individual child the freedom of learning. Bracey (2003, 183) writes that “The standards movement, alas, has returned to the conception that children are just small grownups, and the consequences could be severe. Throwing up on test day could be the least of it.” Students suffer horribly from the testing and measurement regimen to which they are subjected, and the teachers are reduced to mere slavery in their daily practice. Thoreau writes (2001, 248) that “Many a poor-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late , he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.” There is no good in No Child Left Behind, and certainly little real learning.

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• When Fabritius made the offer of an academic position at Heidelberg, Spinoza must have been occupied writing his Ethics, the book many consider his masterpiece, though the incendiary nature of the material precluded its publication during his lifetime. The Ethics was not published until after Spinoza’s death, and then, to ensure the safety of those still alive, the book was issued without publisher’s name nor place of publication. The Ethics has been called “one of the most difficult books ever written,” but at least at the time of its publication, the author was beyond the calumny of its readership. What makes the book so difficult is the geometric method of its structure, and Spinoza’s choice of style remains the subject of some contention. Nevertheless, the method is integral to Spinoza’s theme: the liberation of human life from the enslavement of dogma and coercion. “The geometrical method of the Ethics represented for Spinoza precisely such a model of human self-making, a construction of the mind that could serve as an expression of human power and freedom” (Smith 2003, 200). The Ethics represents Spinoza’s ultimate hope for human possibility. Smith (2003, 4) says “The Ethics is a celebration of life, of joy and laughter, of sociability and friendship. Spinoza’s philosophy culminates not in the grim and remorseless recognition of necessity . . . but in the enjoyment of the pleasures of mind and body working together as a unified whole that helps to secure the conditions of human autonomy.” The Ethics was meant as Spinoza’s ultimate statement, his magnum opus, though at the time of the offer of the professorship, Spinoza had published very little, and what little had reached the public ear was for the most part, excoriated for its author’s heretical views and an advocacy of a freedom few monarchs and clergy were prepared to offer. His scholarly reputation was not in the ascendant. Spinoza had published, though with little success and great infamy. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise had appeared in 1669-70. It had met with a response both enviable, in that this was a volume that some had even read, and horrible, in that those who read it despised it volubly and with a passion almost unprecedented.. The Tractatus was published anonymously in Latin, but many knew the work to be that of Baruch de Spinoza. Steven Nadler (1999, 295) writes that “The book reached the Dutch reading public in early 1670. The reaction, far and wide, was immediate, harsh, and unforgiving. Spinoza quickly became identified as an enemy— perhaps the enemy—of piety and religion. Some of his more extreme critics accused him of being an agent of Satan, perhaps even the Antichrist himself.” The Theological-Political Treatise appeared just two years before the violent assassination of the deWitt brothers, Holland’s republican leaders; Spinoza’s advocacy of the deWitts and his advocacy of the liberty and freedom they espoused, aligned him with what were considered dangerous elements in Dutch society, and endangered his well-being, and even his life. When Fabritus extended the offer of an academic position to Spinoza, then, the solitary philosopher had lived most of public life in disrepute. It must be recalled at this time that in 1656, when Spinoza was but 24 years old, the Jewish community had pronounced a cherem on him, and he had been excommunicated for reasons upon which we can only speculate, but must certainly have had something to do with his criticism of Jewish beliefs and practices, his re-definition of God, and his critique of Scriptures. These issues would be formally explored in the Tractatus. In that work, the philosopher meant to reestablish the world on a liberal and rational basis, providing the maximum degree of liberty for all of the citizenry. The tyranny of the religious infrastructure, hr argued, had enslaved the populace, enslaved and denied it the freedom his philosophy espoused. “The aim of the work [The Theologica-Political Tractatus’] as a whole is the liberation of the individual from bondage to superstition and ecclesiastical authority. Spinoza’s ideal is the free or autonomous individual who uses reason to achieve mastery over the passions” (Smith, 1997, 17). The freedom that Spinoza advocated in the Tractatus was intolerable not only to the rulers, but to the cultural elite as well, even as this freedom was unimaginable to the populace for which Spinoza really had little affection but for whom he had, apparently, high hopes. Spinoza’s work was so radical that his book had to be published anonymously and under the imprint of a fictitious publisher. Nonetheless, I think that Spinoza’s idea of ‘positive liberty’, according to which one can only be free in a self-governing community where every citizen participates in the creation of law,” (Smith, 2003, 126) seems a precursor to John Dewey’s insistence that democracy was essential for a proper education, but that only by education could democracy exist. For Dewey, as for Spinoza, “only the intelligent man could be free, but only the free man could be intelligent” (Hampshire, 107). Thus, whatever facilitates the development of knowledge and intelligence is necessarily good for the individual and should be pursued; whatever obstructs knowledge and intelligence must be avoided. As Dewey devoted his entire intellectual life exploding the persistence of dualisms as misleading ways of defining the world, so, too, did Spinoza believe that the primary dualism separating mind and body, “like all dualisms, inevitably leads to contradictions” (Hampshire, 72) I do not know that Dewey and Spinoza have ever been formally linked in academic discourse, but I draw a great deal of comfort thinking of John Dewey as a closet Spinozist. Both Dewey and Spinoza sought to develop the rational capabilities of the human being for the purpose of living a more free and satisfying life. Dewey’s idea of education, a reconstruction of experience, as postmodern as it is modern, as psychoanalytic as it is materialist, was to enable the individual to understand the meaning—individual, social and cultural— of experience. Dewey writes (1964, 273): When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure and method, it becomes reasonable—rational. When what we suffer from things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant—enlightening and instructive.

Dewey never eschewed rigorous intellectual endeavors; rather, he understood that meaningful learning occurs best in the pursuit of meaningful living. Similarly, for Spinoza learning has purpose and meaning when it occurs in the pursuit of living. If Spinoza believed that our learning was always incomplete, nevertheless, he knew that the more we learned, the greater would be our understanding of the natural laws by which we functioned and by which we participated in the world. Genuine knowledge, for Spinoza, would be a sequence of ideas “each one of which follows logically from its predecessor” (Hampshire, 74). This knowledge would make us free. “A free man is one who lives under the guidance of reason, who is not led by fear, but who directly desires that which is good, in other words, who strives to act, to live, and to preserve his being on the basis of seeking his own true advantage; wherefore such an one thinks of nothing less that of death, but his wisdom is a meditation of life . . . I call free him who is led solely by reason” (1955, 232). I think Spinoza very much meant to mentor to this wisdom those with whom he met and talked; I suspect he actually himself lived in this wisdom. I think that Spinoza would have been an excellent teacher. I just don’t think that his effort would have much efficacy in the schools.

• John Dewey held out a similar hope for education. Dewey believed that it was not knowledge that the schools must seek to develop, but the capacity for wisdom and responsibility. This effort required the acquisition of knowledge. Dewey writes in Democracy and Education: A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline . . . Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task—these things are or are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the development of power to recognize what one is about and to persistence in accomplishment” (129).

The schools, Dewey warns, ought not to crush individual interests, but neither must the schools indulge them. Rather, the curriculum must engage the interests of the student so that s/he will develop discipline, by which concept Dewey meant continuity of attention and endurance. He held that the ‘training of thought’ released the individual from the present, enabled her to plan the future, and arranged for object use. Thought permitted untrammeled access to the world, and gave power to the student. Dewey (1964, 400) writes that “Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not matters of conscious purpose but of quality of active response. Their acquisition is fostered of course by conscious intent . . .” It is the process of thought that must be developed in the school and through the curriculum if education was to be effective for democratic life.

• Spinoza demands from ‘the wise man’ the same rigor as Dewey demands from the school, and for much the same purpose. Spinoza understands that all errors are the result of a lack of knowledge, and that all errors are not absolute, but are a product of incomplete knowledge. Learning is the antidote to such ignorance, but as John Lennon reminds us, “It don’t come easy.” Spinoza writes (1955, 270-1) at the end of the Ethics: “If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” Dewey never felt that school must be made easy, but that it should be meaningful. “Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does [the student] think” (1964, 160). Spinoza never meant that education should be productive, but that it should be redemptive. I believe the two are my teachers, but if Dewey spent most of his life in the public classroom, Spinoza rejected this venue. Though the offer might have promised some public recognition of his work, though the offer might have offered him a greater audience for his ideas, though the offer might have ended his self-exile in the Netherlands, Spinoza rejected Fabritius’ offer of an ordinary professorship.

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• In reality, it does not appear that Fabritius relished the task of making the invitation to Spinoza on behalf of Karl Ludwig: Fabritius despised the little he had seen or heard of Spinoza’s work. He had apparently read the Theological-Political Treatise, and he expressed horror and outrage at its matter. He wrote to his friend and biographer, Joseph Heidegger, “I shudder when I see such unbridled licentiousness being presented in a public display, and the Christian religion itself and Holy Scripture being so openly blasphemed” (Nadler, 1999, 312). In fact, I do not think Fabritius cared to have any association with Spinoza or his ideas. Nonetheless, the Elector Palatine had directed him to invite Spinoza to join the University as a regular professor, and to offer him all of the amenities that attach to that position. As the elector’s representative, Fabritius offered a valued position in the University to what would appear to be his intellectual nemesis. In the medieval world, Heidelberg had been one of the premier institutions of learning, though by the time the position was offered to Spinoza, the intellectual and fiscal wealth of the university had seriously declined. Indeed, in 1622 the library of the University was stolen and removed to Rome! Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine desired to return Heidelberg to its former position, and perhaps it was this hope that provoked his invitation to Spinoza. But by the time of the Elector’s offer, Heidelberg, as had many institutions, had become a Calvinist ideological bulwark, and heretical views were not easily tolerated. Spinoza was nothing if not a heretic. In 1656, as I have noted, he had been excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for activities about which one could only speculate. Though he changed his name from the Hebrew Baruch to the Latinate Benedict, he never became a Christian, nor were the Christians enamored by his philosophy. Steven Smith (1997, 25) suggests that “Spinoza attacks Judaism as an opening gambit to get at Christianity. His real target, however, was Christian sectarianism and intolerance, not Jewish particularity and exclusivity.” In the Treatise, Spinoza “champions the freedom of thought and opinion and the toleration of religious heterodoxy, argues for the subordination of the clergy to the secular powers, and defends the independent use of reason as an inalienable human right” (Smith, 1997, 10). Given this theological and religious agenda which represented no less than a revolution in medieval Christian world view, it is no wonder that Spinoza aroused the hatred of those in power. Thus, to my mind the offer from Fabritius appears somewhat odd, even suspect. But it does seem to assume a great deal of power in the podium. Spinoza rejected the offer and the apparent power. That, too, must be scanned.

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• Spinoza clearly loved learning. He had been a star pupil in the Talmud Torah of Amsterdam, and, perhaps, if his father had not died and thereby, obliging Baruch to maintain with his uncle the family business, he might have studied to become a respected Rabbi in the community. His knowledge of languages included French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew. In addition to his work at Talmud Torah studying traditional Jewish texts and methods, Spinoza enrolled in the school taught by Franciscus Van den Enden, where apparently he learned Latin, studied philosophy and perhaps even acquired a political education, “not just in the sense that Van den Enden gave him the classic works of political thought to read (including Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince and the Discourses, Hobbes’s De Cive, and Grotius’s republican writings), but also that Spinoza’s commitment to a secular, tolerant, democratic state was influenced both by his tutor’s own opinions an by those whom he might have met in the house on the Singel” (Nadler, 1999, 113). It is probable that Spinoza assisted with the teaching at Van den Enden’s school as well. One student, Johannes Caesar, became Spinoza’s student, “to obtain a thorough instruction in the Cartesian philosophy,” (in Nadler, 1999, 194), but this would be the extent of his experience as a formal pedagogue. Spinoza sought after an intellectual, if not an academic life, and perhaps thought of himself as a “philosopher.” What this might have meant to him can be gleaned in part from a fragment published as part of his posthumous works. There Spinoza wrote: Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious. And so they think they are doing something wonderful, and reaching the pinnacle of learning, when they are clever enough to bestow manifold praise on such human nature as is nowhere to be found, and to make verbal attacks on that which, in fact, exists. For they conceived of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be. Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, they have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it” (Political Treatise, Chpt. I, Part I, p 287).

It is not uninteresting to speculate that Spinoza believed almost two centuries before Marx, that philosophers had yet only described the world, but that they had not yet undertaken to change it. I think Spinoza meant in his work to accomplish the latter. He meant to offer to his fellow citizens a means to a life free of all that is not life. In another fragment, “On the Improvement of the Understanding,” Spinoza (1955, 3) sets out to learn “whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discover and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.” I cannot think but that Spinoza’s desire was to offer in his writings and teachings the opportunity of liberty and happiness to all. Spinoza’s desire seems to accord with the satisfactions Eisner attributes to the classroom, but Spinoza refused the offer. For Spinoza, life was a way of being and not a theoretical construct. In his uncompleted manuscript “On the Improvement of the Understanding,” he offers an account of his own method and motivation: “One thing was evident, namely, that while my mind was employed with these thoughts it turned away from its former objects of desire, and seriously considered the search for a new principle; this state of things was a great comfort to me, for I perceived that the evils were not such as to resist all remedies” (1955, 5). What he learned and would teach is how to discover the good life and not what good life to live. A stranger to the land, a heretic excommunicated from his community, an exile in his own land, and yet a lover of liberty and the individual, Spinoza thought his way to freedom, and in the Ethics, sought to offer to his fellow citizens a means to achieve a life of freedom and joy. The Ethics, indeed, perhaps all of Spinoza’s work, was an expression of absolute love for his fellows. Gilles Deleuze (1988, 13) says that the geometric method of the Ethics “is in opposition to what Spinoza calls satire; and satire is everything that takes pleasure in the powerlessness and distress of men, everything that feeds on accusations, on malice, on belittlement, on low interpretations, everything that breaks men’s spirits . . .” The geometric method speaks not in hatred, but in love. I think Spinoza truly meant by his work to liberate his fellows whom he must have loved a great deal. I think he is a wonderful teacher. ✡

• Spinoza’s reasons for declining Elector’s offer, then, are revealing; they speak to an integrity I had in my own study come to expect of him. In his refusal, he is so politic, so deferent, and so cleverly equivocal. He says, “If I had ever desired to take a professorship in any faculty, I could not have wished for any other than that which is offered to me, through you, by His Most Serene Highness the Elector Palatine, especially because of that freedom in philosophical teaching, which the most gracious prince is kind enough to grant, not to speak of the desire which I have long entertained, to live under the rule of a prince, whom all men admire for his wisdom” (Spinoza, 1955, 374). There is first the flattering suggestion that the Elector’s offer is perhaps the only offer that Spinoza might have ever accepted, if he Spinoza had been ever inclined to accept a professorship in any faculty. Spinoza continues:“But since it has never been my wish to teach in public, I have been unable to induce myself to accept his splendid opportunity . . .” What a lovely qualification: it is not the particular offer that Spinoza declines, but the entire possibility of a teaching career that the offer represents. The refusal of the appointment by a man who openly espoused to change the world with his ideas, however, seems odd. To turn down the offer of such a public podium seems self-defeating. If Spinoza had no intention to teach, then what did he intend to do in writing such incendiary texts. Teaching, Spinoza argues, would preclude the activity of philosophical research. Spinoza expresses concern that his teaching duties would take him from his primary task, research, and he was not prepared to forego that interest. This particular rationale is heard regularly in the halls of contemporary academe. At the University level, of course, teachers complain that their teaching load and committee responsibilities take time away from research. For some, of course, it is a specious complaint: they would prefer not to engage in research but are reticent to admit lack of interest. They would blame the system. Of course, at the level of the public schools, teachers rightly bemoan the lack of time to engage in private research pursuits. I think sometimes that action research was invented to provide opportunity to teachers to engage in scholarly activity even with their full teaching load. And though most states mandate continue education, these obligations are too often viewed as yet another drain on the limited independence of the individual teacher, and these courses must too often receive minimum attention. Spinoza, too, had to earn a living, and so he ground lenses, which must certainly have taken him from his philosophical research. And he repeatedly refused offers of money which would have relieved him of his pecuniary efforts; with these added resources he could have spent more time in his philosophical research. No, I do not think Spinoza refused the offer because teaching would have denied him time for philosophical research; rather, I think Spinoza believed that the offer of the professorship would have diverted his research from paths in which he would walk. “I am not holding back in the hope of getting something better, but through my love of quietness, which I think I can in some measure secure, if I keep away from lecturing in public” (1955, 375). There is, I think, a certain noise endemic to academia, and a certain quiet which comes from being away from its turmoils. We are privileged at the University that we can shut our doors to achieve some semblance of peace; in the public schools, teachers retreat from the chaos of the classrooms, hallways and lunchrooms to the lounges dedicated specifically to them. But these rooms, as teachers well know, are no respite from the school cacophony and provide little safe haven. The opportunity for study and reflective contemplation is minimal and not supported at these institutions. The demands and the geography of the school precludes the possibility of such effort. We are very busy, but we do very little. William Pinar (2004, 252-3) cautions, “Too often we have mistaken busywork for academic work, authoritarianism for authority, indifference for professional dignity . . . We must abandon infantalized positions from which we demand to know ‘what works.’” I think that Pinar’s justified invective accurately depicts the environment Spinoza rightly rejected, one that reduces teachers to factory operatives, and that results in too many first year teachers abandoning the profession and too many seasoned professionals compromising their beliefs. Thus, Spinoza’s second reason for rejecting the offer seems akin to the first: He writes, “I do not know the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publicly established religion” (2004, 252-3). That is, for Spinoza, being a teacher automatically requires the comprising of one’s ideas and one’s integrity. Spinoza rightly understood that the state was not going to support the teachings of anyone who espoused the elimination of the state’s authority and power. Pinar (2004, 31). argues that Being a theorist does mean that the contemporary curriculum organization and the modes of cognition it requires must be bracketed, situated in history, politics, and our own life histories. Such understanding might allow us to participate in school reform in ways that do not hypostatize the present, but rather, allow our labor and understandings to function . . . to enlarge the understanding and deepen the intelligence of the participants. The tragedy of the present is that school reform—as it is currently cast—cannot achieve this.

Indeed, it is to the maintenance of the present (what Pinar refers to as the ‘nightmare of the present’ ) that the state desires its servants, of whom the teacher is one, to justify and support. Diane Ravitch (1995, 12) writes “Content standards (or curriculum standards) describe what teachers are supposed to teach and students are expected to learn. They provide clear, specific descriptions of the skills and knowledge that should be taught to students.” These standards, Ravitch (1994, xxvi) avers, must be based on “what is required for successful participation in higher education, the work force, and civil life.” If the state sets the purposes of education, then the teacher in the classroom serves the state. This was completely antithetical to everything which Baruch de Spinoza believed in and about which he wrote. To the offer to assume the responsibilities of the classroom, Spinoza said, “I prefer not to.”✡

• There is another of whom I would speak who refused a public school teacher’s life. Like Spinoza, in his writings and speakings, Henry David Thoreau meant to offer his fellow citizens a method for avoiding a life of quiet desperation. “Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes,—with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary . . . be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought” (438). It was learning that Thoreau desired, and it was teaching of which he spoke. In language remarkably similar to that of Spinoza, Thoreau wrote in Walden that he went to the woods to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary” (1970, 222). And Thoreau, as did Spinoza and Marx and Dewey, saw the ideal philosopher as not one who only talked about the world, but as one who actually changed it.“There are,” Thoreau accused, “professors of philosophy, but not philosophers . . . To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” To be a philosopher, then, is to be a teacher. Thoreau’s learning directly concerned the fulfillment of living, a goal Dewey espoused as the ends of an education. Thoreau’s ideal was a life fulfilled in a society that made possible a fulfilled life. I learned this at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, poverty, nor weakness weakness.” (Walden, 440).

I think Spinoza and Thoreau would have been welcome companions.

• Thoreau, we are told, quit his first teaching appointment because as a disciplinary measure he was required to cane his students. Edward Waldo Emerson writes (1999, 9) that one day Thoreau was being observed by one of the administrators of the public school in Concord, Massachusetts. “Deacon _ sat through one session with increasing disapproval, waiting for corporal chastisement, the corner stone of a sound education, and properly reproved the teacher. The story which one of Thoreau’s friends told me was, that with a queer humour,—he was very young,— he, to avoid taking the town’s money, without giving the expected equivalent, in the afternoon punished six children, and that evening resigned the place where such methods were required” (9). In a letter to Orestes Brownson, Thoreau writes, “I have even been disposed to regard the cowhide as a nonconductor. Methinks that, like the electric wire, not a single spark of truth is ever transmitted through its agency to the slumbering intellect it would address.” With his brother, John, he next opened a private school for the children of Concord, but his methods and philosophical position alarmed the children’s parents. Indeed, it is said that Ellen Sewall, a participant in the school, and to whom both Thoreau brothers proposed marriage, was ordered by her father to refuse both offers. The school closed. Teaching figured prominently in the lives of both Spinoza and Thoreau, but being a teacher was anathema to each. In “On the Improvement of Understanding,” Spinoza writes ( 1955, 6) that “This, then, is the end for which I strive, to attain to such a character myself, and to endeavour that many should attain to it with me. In other words, it is part of my happiness to lend a helping hand, that many others may understand even as I do, that their understanding and desire may entirely agree with my own.” Thoreau too wished to teach. In a letter to Orestes Brownson, Thoreau (1999, 29-30) writes, “I would make education a pleasant thing both to the teacher and the

scholar . . . We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him. But I am not blind to the difficulties of the case; it supposes a degree of freedom which rarely exists.” It was this freedom which Spinoza and Thoreau sought in their philosophy so that learning could exist, and it is these satisfactions of teaching that Eisner proclaims. But our teachers are preferring not to teach in the public schools, that environment anathema to their efforts.

• For the most part, Thoreau and Spinoza suggest, the school fosters not learning but miseducation. Thoreau writes, “How many schools I have thought of which I might go to but did not go to! Expecting foolishly that some greater advantages or schooling would come to me.” And Thoreau’s lineal descendent, John Dewey, attributes (1964, 401-02) the division of mind which current curriculum fosters to “stern discipline, i.e., external coercive pressure . . . motivation through rewards extraneous to the thing to be done . . . everything that makes schooling merely preparatory . . . ends being beyond the pupil’s present grasp . . . exaggerated emphasis upon drill exercises deigned to produce skill in action, independent of any engagement of thought—exercises have no purpose but eh production of automatic skill . . . What do teachers imagine is happening to thought and emotion when the latter get no outlet in the things of immediate activity?” Dewey implicitly criticizes the teacher for this sorry state of affairs, but in our contemporary climate, in which the teacher serves only the state, it is the government which must bear responsibility. What both Spinoza and Thoreau said of the parochial schools is eminently true of the public schools today. In his A Walk in Canada Thoreau (2001, 285) writes that “We saw one schoolhouse on our walk and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.” For Spinoza as well, little value could be derived from the school building, and for Spinoza, the Romish Church, was no less a barrier to freedom, than our present educational quaqmire. We have too much demand these days for professors of philosophy, and too little desire for philosophers. Our contemporary standards “bestride the narrow world/Like a Colussus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs and peep about/To find ourselves dishonourable graves” (I, ii, 35-38). Pinar (2004, 30) accuses that “We teachers are conceived by others, by the expectations and fantasies of our students and by the demands of parent, administrators, policymakers, and politicians, to all of whom we are sometimes the ‘other.’” Gerald Bracey notes that as a result of the strictures imposed by the legislation known as No Child Left Behind, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Bracey warns (2003, 16) that the incessant testing will ensure “that a great deal of time will be spent preparing for the test and that a great deal of attention will be given to the results. Teachers will stifle thought, discussion, and question asking in the name and hope of raising test scores. Call it educational terrorism. I can’t think of a better way to destroy a nation.” Who would such fardels bear. Too many prefer not to. Advocates of standards and measurements continue to insist not merely on the imposition of national standards, but on the imposition of their national standards. The ideological debate concerning the History curriculum points out the overtly ideological nature of the curriculum. In her argument advocating the imposition of national standards in education (1994, xxvii), Diane Ravitch urges that “the standards should be limited only to what students should know and be able to be well prepared for subsequent study, higher education, civil participation, and technical careers.” Teachers have, thus, little freedom in the classroom, and no incentive to be so. Because these advocates insist also on the necessity of regular assessment. The agglomeration of these autarkic achievements would lead, it is assumed, though not here stated, to a life fulfilled. Thoreau’s complaint that education turns a meandering brook into a straight cut ditch depicts exactly the effects of such an education. Ravitch’s list reminds me of the arguments of advocates for the subskill approach to reading: if each discrete skill of which reading is comprised is properly taught and learned, a student will become a good reader. Even E.D. Hirsh (2006, 11), though he mislabels this approach as romantic, decries this educational ideology. .In his advocacy for a knowledge-based curriculum he accuses, “I call this romantic idea, —‘formalism’—a belief that reading comprehension can best be improved by acquiring formal comprehension strategies, not by building children’s knowledge base.” This belief holds the school in isolation from the whole of the student and teacher’s life, and reduces learning to the sterile and disconnected shards of memory. More, the assumption that if only we would teach then students would learn is wholly fallacious. On the one hand, it is based in a misapprehension concerning the process of learning. This is a very complex issue, but let it rest for now with the Joseph Schwab (1971, 496): “The child with whom we work is both more and less than the percentile ranks, social class, and personality type into which she falls . . . we will . . . teach ‘Tilda well only as we take account of conditions . . . which are not included in the theories which describe [her] as a learning child . . . We must take notice of these conditions, make some estimate of the relveance of each to the task in hand, and devise some means by which to cope with them.” Even Terril Bell (in Bracey, 2003, 64), under whose tenure as Secretary of Education A Nation at Risk appeared with its vicious attack on the school system and its teachers, has written apologetically, We have placed too much confidence in school reforms that affected only six hours a day of a child’s life . . . In the face of many negative influences on our children that come from outside the school, we have done well to maintain our high school completion rate and our level of performance on achievement measures . . . We have foolishly concluded that any problems with the levels of academic achievement have been caused by faulty schools staffed by inept teachers.

Nonetheless, the attacks proceed without pause. We are a profession besieged and vilified. We teachers are continually accused of incompetency, and blamed irresponsibly for the nation’s problems. We teachers are over-stressed and underpaid. We lack self respect and are offered none by the public.. As William Pinar says, “The present historical moment is, then, for public-school teachers and for those of us in the university who work with them, a nightmare” (2004, 3). We must struggle out way out.

• His most Serene Highness the Elector Palatine, my most gracious master, commands me to write to you, who are, as yet, unknown to me, but most favourably regarded by his Most Serene Highness, and to inquire of you, whether you are willing to accept an ordinary professorship of Philosophy in his illustrious university.

  I prefer not to. AlanBlock/PapeR1 here.