I begin the first chapter of my teaching memoir Nice Work If You Can Get It with a scene from my favorite television show. In an early, first-season episode of The West Wing, presidential speech writer Sam Seaborn is attracted to Mallory O’Brien, a fifth-grade teacher who is also the daughter of White House chief of staff Leo McGarry. Sam has managed to offend Mallory unintentionally and wants her to know what he really thinks about teachers:
Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.
From your words to God’s ears, Sam. If teachers ruled the world . . .
The fall semester begins in a couple of weeks, so as usual in the middle of August my thoughts turn to returning to the classroom. As it turns out, I am currently reading Diana Butler Bass’s Freeing Jesus, in which she explores several different paradigms for understanding Jesus outside typical religious frameworks. The chapter titles are not particularly promising (“Friend,” “Savior,” “Lord,” for instance) because they bring me back to my evangelical, fundamentalist upbringing in which I would rather not spend any more time. But Butler Bass has experience in the world I come from, so her emergence to new and creative insights is inspiring so far (I’m only halfway through the book).
Her chapter titled “Teacher” gave me new ways to think about my own vocation which now extends more than thirty-five years. She grew up in a Methodist religious world in which Jesus as an inspired teacher was an acceptable paradigm for understanding him. The best teachers are moral and intellectual exemplars, inviting us to stretch ourselves and explore places we might never encounter without a teacher as our guide. It was not until her teenage years, when encountering conservative evangelical Christianity, that she learned that “Jesus as teacher . . . [is] one of the ideas that had for nearly a century driven a wedge between conservative and liberal Protestants.”
For evangelicals, “Jesus as teacher” is far too weak and non-exclusive. Certainly Jesus is more than Gandhi, Mohammed, or MLK Jr. who could all fit the definition of “great teacher.” If Jesus was the Son of God and the Savior of the world, then calling him “teacher” is far too diminishing, perhaps even blasphemous or heretical. Over the years, though, as Diana Butler Bass became a college professor herself, she came to realize that her “problem was more in my definition of ‘teacher’ than with Jesus.”
If one’s definition of a teacher is one who purveys information while also safeguarding traditional values and standards of citizenship, then it might be correct to say, as one of Diana Butler Bass’s friends quipped, that “the problem with ‘Jesus as teacher’ is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s shallow.” I’m reminded of something that philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote about the process of education. He said that the purpose of primary and secondary education is to produce “literate citizens,” to mold and shape young people into functioning members of society by teaching them the basic norms and principles required to get along in our culture.
But Rorty continued by suggesting that the point of non-vocational higher education is to empower the student to directly question and challenge everything she or he learned in primary and secondary school, “to help students realize that they can reshape themselves—that they can rework the self-image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent citizens, into a new self-image, one that they themselves have helped to create.” Diana Butler Bass learned that teachers are more than purveyors of information and guardians of the status quo. She learned that “great teachers . . . modeled a generosity of knowledge and spirit that transformed the lives of their students. Indeed, the best teachers I have ever known—as well as the teacher I aspired to be—nurtured a way of being in the world.”
When I was the director of my college’s large interdisciplinary program required of all students in their freshman and sophomore years, I often told the faculty that in my estimation what we were doing in the classroom had far less to do with content and far more to do with equipping our students with the tools of lifetime learning. As Marcus Borg writes, this opens the door to a much richer understanding of “Jesus as teacher.” “Jesus was not primarily a teacher of either correct beliefs or right morals. Rather, he was a teacher of a way or path, specifically a way of transformation.”
Jesus invited his students and invites us into a way of life based on a vision of a radically generous God who created everything, turns authority upside down, shatters the pretenses of power, proclaims a kingdom of the heart, and who places the poor, the widows, the orphans, and all those who are disenfranchised in the center of our attention. He calls his followers—his students—into a way of joy and hope, as well as of loss, self-sacrifice, and the cross. All of this fits a full-bodied definition of “teacher.”
Toward the end of her chapter “Teacher,” Diana Butler Bass reflects on some features of the teaching life with which, after thirty-five years in the college classroom, I strongly resonate.
Although teaching is a great responsibility and a deeply spiritual calling, it is also hard, often gut-wrenching, work to accompany students on a journey of learning, especially when your profession is made a scapegoat for all of society’s ills by angry parents or greedy politicians. We have forgotten the honor of the title “teacher.”
And yet, as I often say, it is nice work if you can get it.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In