Publications:
GTP Handbook / The Tutor
GTP Handbook
Queries for Self-analysisKenneth E. Boulding, Professor Emeritus
Institute of Behavioral ScienceCopyright ©2002, Graduate Teacher Program
The Quakers have developed an ingenious method of collective ethical analysis in their queries, a set of loaded questions intended in these days primarily for self-examination but also continually revised to meet the consensus of the group. Thus, the query has a certain advantage over the commandment, in that even the query itself may be questioned. Hence, it leads to ethical analysis rather than to dogma. The following queries for teachers are therefore intended to provoke ethical analysis, and they are, of course, relevant to all teachers. Social scientists, however, may have a peculiar responsibility for seeking further knowledge about the implied social system.
1. Do I abuse my position of superior status to students by treating them as moral or social inferiors?
The problem of the relevance of the status structure of the classroom, or more generally the problem of the teacher-student relationship, to success in the teaching-learning process is one that needs much further study. To a certain extent the teacher-student relationship, by its very nature, is hierarchical, in that a teacher is supposed to teach the student more than the student teaches him. In an unbalanced exchange of this kind, hierarchy always arises. Furthermore, in the organization of education, teachers are usually in a superior position in the threat system. They can threaten students with failure much more effectively than students can threaten them with failure as teachers.
The instructor grades the students, the students do not usually grade him. This is the kind of situation from which arises the possibility of abuse. We need to know much more about the effect of exploitation of status on the learning process. We need to know more, for instance, about the effects of bullying and sarcasm in blocking learning. On the other hand, it is also possible that too much emphasis on equality of status between the teacher and the student, by making the student inattentive or disrespectful and unwilling to accept what the teacher has to say, may also diminish the effectiveness of the learning process. One of the principal research problems here is the measurement and detection of these status attitudes. At the moment they are never clearly defined in the evaluation of the teacher, and because of this many teachers who do enormous damage to the learning process may be employed.
2. Am I careful to avoid using my authority to force factual acceptance of propositions which may be only opinion or hypothesis?
Do I tolerate honest disagreement? Would I be pleased if I were ever proved to be wrong by a student?
This question is closely related to the first. The authority of teachers, because they are also the examiners or judges, is dangerously great; teachers may be unwilling to accept challenge to their authority, either from students or from the world around. It is part of the myth of science that authority comes only from the "real world," not from authoritative persons, past or present. It is not easy for any kind of scientist to convey this in the classroom where the status symbols--the desk, the podium, the blackboard--all reinforce the authority of the teacher rather than the authority of the subject matter itself. One could visualize some interesting experimental work in this field with a view to finding out what kind of teaching produces the scientific ethic and what kind produces the authoritarian ethic.
3. Do I express my overt or covert hostility to my students in my teaching? Am I irritated by student failure, or am I quick to detect and encourage growth in knowledge and understanding, however slow or imperfect?
This query raises the question of the teacher's personality, rather than of attitude toward status, although the two are clearly related, for hostile people have a strong tendency to seek authoritarian status. It would be interesting to know whether teaching attracts more hostile personalities than other occupations. We might well find that teachers are sharply bimodal, that some are attracted into the profession because they find the transmission of knowledge pleasurable. These people are likely to be friendly, rather than hostile, toward students. Others, however, may enter the profession because they have failed elsewhere. One recalls Bernard Shaw's unkind crack "Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach." Teachers who are frustrated executives or politicians are very likely to work out their frustrations and hostilities on their students, and this may be damaging to the learning process. Here again, an instrument that would detect this kind of hostility and frustration would be of great value, for the teacher who is both hostile and authoritarian may be enormously damaging.
4. Am I myself interested in the subject matter that I am teaching? Do I enjoy learning more about it, and do I carry over to the students my own enthusiasm for the subject?
There is a widespread belief that enthusiasm for the subject can compensate for a good many deficiencies in teaching technique. A famous example of this was John R. Commons of the University of Wisconsin, who is reported to have been a very poor lecturer; yet he inspired a whole generation of students who were active, for instance, in developing the New Deal and who in many ways changed the face of America. The negative proposition is probably more easily demonstrated than the positive one; certainly teachers who are bored with their own subjects make life miserable for students as well as for themselves. For this reason, there is much to be said for rotating courses among teachers, so that nobody teaches the same course for too long.
5. Do I convey to my students both the setting and the significance of my subject matter, so that it appears neither isolated nor irrelevant?
This query is closely related to the previous one, though it covers a slightly different point. Teachers may often be enthusiastic about their own particular specialties, without appreciating adequately where it stands in the great republic of learning and what its broad significance may be. There is a certain division of opinion here between those who favor orderly presentation of subject matter and those who believe that the main function of the teacher is to digress, assuming that the textbook is usually orderly enough and that the function of the teacher is to introduce a little creative disorder by showing the student that no subject is as tidy as it seems.
6. Do I convey to students the necessity for intellectual discipline and sense of the need for hard work on difficult intellectual tasks if the practical problems of our society are to be solved?
This query should perhaps be particularly addressed to idealistic teachers who have idealistic students. Good will is a complement, not a substitute, for good knowledge. Likewise, euphoria is a very poor substitute for truth. While dullness has a strong claim to being considered as the most deadly sin of the teacher, excitement in itself is not always a virtue, for it may distract people from doing the hard, slogging work that is always necessary for the mastery of a difficult subject. There is a delicate problem of balance here. The teacher, especially in the social sciences, can easily discourage the idealist too greatly by pointing out the extraordinary difficulties that lie in the way of good social change. Like Hamlet, we need to avoid being "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." The teacher in the social sciences, especially, has to walk a difficult tightrope between the kind of despair and atrophy of the moral sense that sometimes comes from over-intellectualization and the hyperactivity that can easily be destructive of those who are both morally aroused and proudly ignorant.
7. Do I convey to students the importance of technical skills and at the same time leave them problem-oriented rather than technique-oriented, the master and not the servant of the skills they have acquired?
The query again, is closely related to the preceding one, but it is addressed to what is the particular vice of the social sciences, especially of economics. Techniques usually arise in response to problems, and certainly one needs to encourage the use of the best intellectual tools. On the other hand, techniques tend to have a certain life of their own and to become ends in themselves. This is particularly true of advanced statistical and mathematical techniques. Furthermore, the ability to use a technique and to develop technical skill becomes a point of professional pride and a measure of professional achievement. This is dangerous if it leads to an evaluation on the basis of ability to manipulate existing techniques, rather than from the point of view of ability to struggle with the "real world." The danger of technique-oriented education is that it creates what Veblen called "trained incapacity": persons who are trained exclusively in techniques prefer to do only the things that can be done with the techniques that they have learned rather than to tackle jobs that may be more important but that are unresponsive to their existing tools, like a surgeon insisting on using his scalpel to dig away a snowdrift. The teacher often tends to underrate what he does not understand and overrate what he does understand, and it is hard for him to walk a tightrope between these two extremes.
8. Is my relation to other teachers one of cooperation in a great common task of transmitting and extending the knowledge structure of society, or am I jealous and suspicious of others? Am I conscious of my citizenship in the academic community? Do I insist on doing only those things that will lead to my personal advancement?
This query raises large and difficult issues. Advancement in the academic community rarely comes from good teaching. Still more rarely does it come from doing the necessary "menial" intellectual labor of the academic community. In the absence of an economic system that rewards good teaching directly there is great necessity for constant reiteration of the ethical principles of what constitutes good citizenship in the academic community.
Communities, however, may be subject to "ethical strain" where the organization of the community, and especially of the reward structure, does not conform to real interest and productivities. Ethical strain is a much neglected area in the social sciences--indeed, the concept is hardly recognized. We are becoming intensely aware of it, however, in such problems as economic development, relations with government, and the power structure in general. Hypocrisy, subterfuge, and corruption are visible symptoms of ethical strain. The social sciences may perhaps make an important contribution to solving this problem by pointing out that the answer to ethical strain may not lie in stepping up the level of exhortation and preaching. It may lie, rather, in reorganizing the institutions and the payoffs of society itself. This is as true inside the academic community as it is outside it. It is one of the paradoxes of the social sciences, indeed, that whereas social science was used to study practically every tribe and every form of human organization and relationship, the one great unstudied area is the university itself, perhaps because it is too close to home. A much more serious social science study of educational organizations than we have had in the past should clearly be on the agenda for the future.
9. Do I have a proper sense of my own dignity as a teacher and researcher, and do I have an equivalent sense of the dignity of all those with whom I come in contact?
This query perhaps summarizes all the others. Unless teachers have a sense of their own worth and of the importance of their tasks, they should be doing something else.
I am content to leave the matter at this point and to conclude with a personal testimony that for thirty-five years I have found teaching, with all its frustrations and difficulties, to be a very good life, and I expect the situation to continue in the future.
Reprinted with permission of K.E. Boulding. Excerpted from William H. Morris, ed., "The Task of the Teacher in the Social Sciences." Effective College Teaching, American Council on Education, 1970.
