At the Weekly Standard Joseph Epstein reviews George Steiner’s “Lessons of the Masters”:
The “Lessons of the Masters” is a book about the teaching transaction, the dissemination (there’s that damn fluid again) of knowledge as it is passed from generation to generation through teacher to student. Why do some teachers so captivate their students that what they convey leaves a lifelong impression? The standard explanations hold that the great teachers know their subject, have boundless passion for learning, widen and deepen consciousness, provide in their persons a model of how a great-souled person ought to live. This only leaves out the key element of magic-which is to say, the unexplainable reason for why some teachers can radically change lives.
Over the course of 185 dense pages George Steiner does not really explain the magic in teaching. Instead he provides partial portraits of some famously great teachers-Socrates (of course), Jesus, the Hasidic masters, Heidegger, Alain, Nadia Boulanger, and others-and takes up a number of issues, questions, and problems surrounding teaching. Among these are the responsibility of teachers for disciples, the tensions (erotic, rivalrous, etc.) between teacher and student, the differing nature of humanistic and scientific teaching, the blights of sexual harassment and political corrections on contemporary teaching, and the increasingly large role of masterly female teachers.
So Epstein doesn’t particulary care for the book but the question of what makes a great teacher is a profound one that I think deserves more study. I only wish I had more time to take it up.
Epstein concludes with this telling passage about the times when teachers sometimes fail to connect with their students because the students don’t want to connect. I saw this many times in at Yale and it was dispiriting.
As a teacher, I noted many students whom I came to think of as “good at school.” The phrase, as I use it, is non-approbative and carries no more weight than, say, “good at soccer.” These students have been trained to take tests, to write the A paper, to score high on their SATs. They understand that the first question confronting the college student is what the hell does the professor want. Once they discover this, they deliver it. They may or may not be genuinely interested in books, ideas, culture. But culture isn’t their goal-business or law or medical school is.
