University of Virginia Library

Danforth Colloquia On Education

Teaching: Self Shaping Process

This is the second of a series of reprinted excerpts from two
Danforth colloquia at the University which were gathered in
booklet form by Charles Vandersee, director of the special Four
Year Doctoral Program in English at the University. The
selection is taken from remarks made by Ralph Cohen who
plans a graduate course in literary history this spring and an
undergraduate course in literary criticism, after a semester in
England.

I have very grave reservations about discussing teaching
altogether. I think I should tell you why. I don't believe that
teaching is done in the classroom to any effect. Students hear
what you say, if you lecture; they'll discuss with you if you
offer to discuss with them. Depending upon their motivations,
they'll repeat back to you what you told them, if they know
that's what you want, and they'll discuss with you if they know
that's what you want. But if you want to talk about teaching,
this seems to me is pretty much a private matter, because I take
it that teaching refers to the way in which you shape yourself.
You absorb knowledge in such a way that it converts you in one
way or another to think, rethink what you're doing....The
process, really, is how a teacher can reach a student, not to
convert him, but to get the student to convert himself.

Individual Teaches Himself

I don't believe in teaching. Intelligent people....are converted
in their own rooms as they think over the material....and try to
rethink what this means to them. If a man is a good teacher,
what happens is that the student begins to shape himself in the
image of the teacher. Now, I'm not sure that that's very good,
but I'm trying to explain what I think teaching is. It's a process
by which an individual teaches himself, and it turns out that if
he admires a statement or an idea that someone offers him, in
order to absorb it, it's a little bit what Eliot said about the
tradition: every new insight in a book in the history of literature
changes all the other books. Every new insight that you decide
you're going to absorb changes you. And it changes you not
because you got a new piece of information but you think
differently about all the old pieces of information you once
had. Then you know that teaching is effective.

A good teacher doesn't shape a person; a good teacher
provides the insight with which a person shapes
himself....There's a very famous speech which [Eugene V.] Debs
gave, and he gave this speech when he was running for President,
and he gave this speech to railroad workers. But the lines in the
speech which are important for our purposes are: "If I could
lead you into Paradise, I would refuse to do it. Because if I can
lead you into Paradise, somebody else can lead you out...."
What a good teacher does is to make it possible for you to do
things yourself.

Most teachers, as I think we all know, not only don't bother
us personally, they just don't bother us....If we were really
bombarded by major teachers in every single class, it would tear
us apart. So in s sense democracy serves a good purpose, you
know — there are mediocrities as well as good teachers....Good
teachers don't let you go.

Touching People

A good teacher — his goodness lies in the fact that he touches
so many different people. Not in the same way — they're
touched in different ways, but what he says is always along the
lines of the centrality of human interests....His concern is always
with the crucial issues that affect human life. And this is the
way words mean — the way they mean in our lives.

You need for good teaching this sense, I think, of centrality.
You can recognize such a teacher because the whole way in
which he deals with a work puts him at once in the very center
of the relation between that work and language and the
significance of language in culture. And it puts him at once into
all the areas in which you as a human being live and want to
live.

Teaching is one of those very unfortunate jobs, because by
the very necessity of the task you deal with human transience.
Every four years people disappear from your life. And the
temptation for a few students who say, "I want to study with
you." you know, "I want to attach myself" — this is a great
temptation and a very understandable one in a position in which
students are always flowing by you. But it seems to me the way
in which you must ultimately live up to it is that the students
who leave should leave with a sense of their own independence.

Changing Concepts

I don't really think, you know, that it makes really a great
deal of difference whether you teach people how to read
carefully or how you should analyze a poem, because there are
many people who are really able to be taught how to interpret a
poem very carefully, who don't really care for it....they don't
want to do this, and they'll do it all right, and they'll do it very
well.... but the thing is, it will never touch them....

It doesn't seem to me that the ability to train people to do
craftsman like things is the same thing as what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is to persuade a person to change his
way of conceiving of literature....his whole conception of
himself and his knowledge. And you're not going to do this by
showing him how to read a poem. You're going to do this
because by talking about poetry in some way you're going to
show him a relevance of what he is doing and can do to what he
is missing and still can do, and force him to say...."By God, for
ten years I've been reading and haven't really learned what it all
means! So now I have to go back and begin from the beginning
again. By God, what a terrible thing it is! But I'm going to do
it....because nothing else matters." When that happens, then you
don't have to worry about teaching him the craft of reading.

There are — and this is what is important for us — people
who are serious about literature, to whom it's significant as an
important part of their life, and they want to find a way to
coming to terms with it. Those are the people who can be
touched by good teaching.

Relevant Works

When I find a good piece of work, one question I want to ask
is, "What makes it good?" People say to me, you know, "Some
works are apparently more relevant than other works." People
will say, "You can't provide good reasons," and so on. But we
all live this way, that is, we all live by making distinctions — I'd
rather do this than do that. And it seems to me important that
somebody concerned with literature face the problem as to why
it is we should make certain distinctions — why it's more
important to read "King Lear" than it is to read "Comedy of
Errors."

Different Temperments

There are immensely different temperaments [in students]
and also immensely different speeds at which people respond.
And that means, you see, that as a student you have to find a
way of manipulating the courses or else have to find a way with
groups of your colleagues in he English Club to propose
alternatives to the present courses....If time and again you find
that demands are made which seem to you irrelevant or trivial
to your finding yourself in the material, then I think some
substantive statement should be drawn up and presented to the
department with suggestions for other options. Because you
have to remember, the function of a graduate school in English
(if we put aside getting people [teaching] credentials in the first
year), is to see that you people — to see that graduate students
— have the best kind of education in which to find their places
in the profession and in themselves....Our purpose is double:
you are supposed to provide us [faculty] with a sense of what's
important, and we're supposed to provide you with a sense of
the significance of the work you want to do. Otherwise, I don't
see any sense of graduate school.