The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith

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      3

      Two Kinds of Teaching

      When I think back over the memorable teachers I had or have known, the fact that stands out most is the diversity of their styles. Bill Levi at Roosevelt College would sit cross-legged on the desk, moving nothing during the entire class hour save his lips and his mind. Meanwhile, at nearby University of Chicago, David Greene was a pacer. Fresh from his farm at eight on wintry mornings, manure still clinging to his boots as Greek poured from his mouth, he strode with a vigor that made the advancing wall seem adversary. We felt sure that sooner or later he would slam his face into it, but he never did; invariably in the nick of time he would swirl and bounce off the wall not his head but his behind, thereby gaining momentum for the return journey. Gustav Bergmann, logical positivist at the State University of Iowa, was so authoritarian that when a student dared to question something he had said he thundered, “Let's get one thing straight: from 10:00 to 11:00 A.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, there is but one God, and his name is Bergmann!” His opposite was a teacher so nondirective on principle that students used to say he not only didn't believe anything, he didn't even suspect anything. I had teachers who wrestled with me socratically as evangelists wrestled with the village drunkard, and teachers who simply dished it out—very well indeed!

      The surprising thing is that learning occurred in all these contexts. I conclude that there is no one way to teach; in writing here of two ways I write only of ways that have taken shape in me. Who knows who learns and under what conditions? The act remains essentially mysterious, like love, or sex, or life itself; more strange than familiar, less science than art, a word to which I shall return.

      METHOD I

      During its first 20 years, my teaching followed a single pattern. Questions and discussion were encouraged and were fun, but lectures were the focus.

      Today, lecturers are on the defensive. Almost everything we would like students to know we can place in their hands via paperback. They can read faster than they can listen to us, and print is durable; they can go back if they miss something or forget.

      All this is true, but the points don't add up to the conclusion that lectures are passé. One of my most memorable learning experiences was a course Thornton Wilder offered, once only, at the University of Chicago. The classroom was in fact an auditorium, and it was invariably packed. If there was a single question or comment from the floor I don't remember it, yet the exhilaration of those hours I shall never forget. I would leave the auditorium walking on air. In those early afternoons of autumn even Chicago was beautiful.

      Plays, too, can be read faster than we can sit through an evening at the theater, but reading doesn't take the place of the performance. Moreover, lectures provide the opportunity for trying out ideas while they are in process of formation and are thus part of the teacher's laboratory. The advantage to the listener is that he or she is not presented with a finished treatise but is watching a living mind at work and being given an insight into its strategies.

      Just as there is no one way to teach, so, too, there is no one way to lecture. John Dewey's lectures are said to have been rambling and dull—until the student awoke to the fact that he was witness to a powerful mind's direct involvement in the act of thinking. Minds have their own dispositions: some, like Wittgenstein's, are splitters; mine happens to be a lumper. This fact, so apparent that I suspect that it is grounded in my brain structure, makes metaphysical reticence impossible for me. And, as it affects my approach to lecturing in other ways as well, before saying more about lecturing proper I propose to indicate why a wholistic approach to my field is, in my case, the only approach possible.

      Gestalt psychology has made its mark, and gestalt therapy is bidding to do so. In this age of analysis, this heyday of analytic philosophy, is there a place for wholistic, gestalt philosophy as well?

      If this discipline takes its cues from the sciences, the answer seems clearly “yes.” Gestalt psychology I have already mentioned; psychology abandoned atomism with its discovery that there is no area of experience, perceptual or otherwise, that is free from what positivists used to call noncognitive factors. In biology, the attempts of molecular genetics “to reach the beautiful simplicity of biological principles through concepts derived from experimental systems in which the ordered structure that is the source of this simplicity has been destroyed [are proving to be] increasingly futile,” and physics, in its complete experience, “does not support the precept that all complex systems are explicable in terms of properties observable in their isolated parts [Commoner 1969].”

      Turning to philosophy itself, epistemology has found element analysis ineffectual. Whether we approach knowing analytically or phenomenologically, reports agree: there is no datum unpatterned, no figure without ground, no fact without theory. Instead of a one-way process whereby through perceptual archeology irrefrangible primitive elements—Hume's impressions, Russell and Moore's sense data—are first spotted and then built into wholes, knowing (we now see) is polar. Part and whole are in dialogue from the start. No man looks at the world with pristine eyes; he sees it edited, and editorial policy is always forged in the widest field of vision available.

      The same holds true for ethics, for doing is vectored by overview as much as knowing is. “Deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and more universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction—for orientation [Shelton 1936].”

      In playing the game of life-orientation, the first rule is to capture everything in sight, for the elusive might prove to be crucial; if it is and it escapes your net, you may get rich, but you won't win. The second rule is to set what has been captured in order, to array it in pattern or design. Thus the twin principles of gestalt philosophy are: (a) attention to the whole, taking care to see that nothing of importance has been omitted; and (b) attention to the pattern of the whole's parts. Complementing clarity and consistency which are the virtues of analytic philosophy, the virtues of gestalt philosophy are scope and design.

      Now back to lecturing. As a gestalt philosopher both these principles of scope and design figure in the way I approach my task. Scope enters to position the topic to be discussed within the panoply of human interests generally. Why among the myriad of things we could talk about during this hour or this semester are we giving time to this? The answer needn't take much time; indeed, no time at all if it is self-evident and acceptable. But it must be evident and acceptable to students, not just to me; that's crucial. Answers which, however evident, are not acceptable to students are: “because the professor happens to be working on a paper of the subject,” “because this is what the instructor was taught in graduate school, so knows most about—read, is most invulnerable with respect to,” “because having avoided math the student needs a course in philosophy to graduate,” or “because it will help those who intend to continue in philosophy to get into graduate school.”

      Once the topic has been positioned in the sense of linked to an acknowledged human interest or need, the elements bearing on the topic must be positioned. Enter pattern or design.

      Paintings begin with a discovery, a new and exhilarating perception. Immediately the painter faces enormous difficulties; he must force shapes and static colors to embody what he has felt and seen. The lecturer's task is analogous. He, too, must fix, articulate, and objectify what on first СКАЧАТЬ