THE DALLAS INSTITUTE OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURE’S
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Winter 2013 • Volume II, Issue I
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From the Cowan Center Director
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Join us for the inaugural 30 anniversary event: Saturday, February 9, 2013, 6:30-8:30 PM.
•D .L C will give a talk. •S
I A will be recognized in a “pinning” ceremony.
• The Sue Rose bronze memorial plaque will be dedicated. •G will include founding faculty, civic leaders, and alumni from the Teachers Academy, Principals Institutes, and Superintendents Symposia. ALUMNI, to hear about special programs, please update your contact information. Contact Terry Han at than@dallasinstitute.org. We thank Kathy King for the many photos she has taken for the Dallas Institute.
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I wish you a happy new year and hope that your holiday season has been filled with joy. As you can see from the banner to the left, 2013 is an extraordinary year for the Dallas Instituteʼs Cowan Center. We will celebrate the program for teachers that began it all—what is now called the Sue Rose Summer Institute for Teachers—in a special event in February. In the fall, the question for the Education Forum will be “What is a teacher?” The book currently being written, in which Summer Institute faculty interpret literary images of teachers, will be the focus of the Education Forum. Throughout the year, the Cowan Center will conduct special programs for educators serving Pre-K—12 students, programs designed to challenge the intellect and to honor the high calling to which these people have given their lives. We invite you to join us for the inaugural event on February 9. (You may register on the Dallas Institute website.) With this critical mass of alumni and well-wishers gathered together, I can almost guarantee that you will not find a more hopeful, galvanizing place to be that evening. Dr. Cowan will lift our minds and hearts with a charge, no doubt, for the next 30 years. Summer Institute alumni—both principals and school teachers—will be “pinned” in what promises to be a moving ceremony. We, as a community, will have the opportunity to bear witness to the dedication of these professionals, those who face challenges and difficulties both from the very nature of the profession and from cultural misconceptions about the work of education overall.
On February 9th, the Dallas Institute will proclaim 2013 “The Year of the Teacher.” We must begin to think seriously about what a teacher is. In our day, the solutions for the problems in education are said to be found primarily in technology or in knowing the learning styles of children or how teachers should teach. We seem to be building an educational system without teachers, a system, unfortunately, that will prepare students neither for life nor for active citizenship. We have forgotten the human beings involved in teaching, that a teacherʼs primary assets are her heart and mind. These are what inspire students to learn and to love learning, and these will be the subject of both our reflection and our celebration in the Cowan Center throughout 2013. There are many voices we need to hear and many ideas we need to consider in this important “Year of the Teacher,” but to begin it all, in this issue of the Cowan Center Newsletter, we have included the transcript of one of Dr. Louise Cowanʼs lectures given at a Teachers Academy conference in 2010. Since then, of course, she has continued to speak eloquently on the subject of teachers, but the response to this talk was so extraordinary that it still rings in my ears. I wanted to begin our “Year of the Teachers” with what moved and inspired the teachers so. With gratitude for your support, Claudia Allums
To read the Cowan Center Newsletter online, go to the Cowan Center page under “Programs” on the Dallas Institute website: www.dallasinstitute.org.
D .L C —From a lecture given at a Teachers Academy Conference November 6, 2010
The following are excerpts from a lecture given by Dr. Louise Cowan on the occasion of a Teachers Academy conference entitled “Mystery and Relevance: Teaching for Meaning Beyond the Self.” The text for this conference came from William Faulknerʼs novel, Go Down, Moses.
I want to begin by saying what I most wish to emphasize. Though the official authority of teachers has been greatly diminished in the past century, their moral and spiritual authority is indestructible. And by spiritual authority Iʼm not referring to anything connected with religion. I mean the ability to testify to the full dimensions of reality, to the enduring vitality of our myths and our mysteries. The Greeks had a word for that region of memory where great heroes and great events reside. They called it kleos, and though they meant by that word something like fame, they didnʼt at all mean what we understand today by that concept. For one thing, kleos was timeless, a dimension of memory and mystery attached to human events and just as real as empirical data. A people without access to this realm is badly hampered on its quest for greatness. And teachers are the “high priests” of this region of communal memory. Without teachers, only bits and pieces of it can emerge to ordinary life, and perhaps in distorted form. Remember that I am not speaking of religion, which is something else entirely with its own importance. Iʼm speaking of the aura of mystery that surrounds ordinary reality which is the teacherʼs duty to unconceal as the philosopher Heidegger would speak of human attempts to reveal hidden truths. And because Iʼve spent a long lifetime of teaching and from the vantage point of universities viewed with frustration what has been happening in public schooling during that lifetime, I want 2
to speak today without caution. I want to speak of this realm of mystery surrounding our ordinary lives, the ignoring of which is having deleterious effects on our national destiny. This realm is what Keats discovered in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” This and his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” were Faulknerʼs favorites. He quotes the “Grecian Urn” poem, as a matter of fact, in the work that you are studying today. In the “Ode to A Nightingale,” the poet, after following his aching heart in drowsy numbness, enters the dark wood where he hears the nightingale sing. The bird carries within its voice the living past. And through the untroubled song of the nightingale, Keats can commune with that past which includes emperor and clown, as he says, perhaps even Ruth of the Old Testament, who in choosing to stay with Naomi forsook her own people and at times “stood in tears amid the alien corn.” These presences available to him only in the precious select moment are the answer to Keatsʼ melancholy, testifying to the value of the human enterprise. Theyʼre undeniably real, though even poets have difficulty getting access to such a revelation in a time of widespread belief in only facts and processes. Only the teacher as “shaman,” as a kind of nightingale, can guide her pupils toward a region where these presences exist, in the dark wood of shared human memory. Having said this, however, we must admit that in our time, the teachersʼ ability to be a conduit for these presences is insufficiently recognized. The world wants teachers to instruct students in practical matters, how to be adept in current procedures, so that the next generation can take over in processes as we say that are already in existence. Thus, the task of the teacher is seen to be a work of relevancy, instruction and skills necessary to maintain the status quo. The
teacherʼs traditional role of spiritual guide, then, directly shaken in the past already by dubious educational theory, has in our time been all but demolished. This determination on the part of the public to reduce learning to practical skills is likely to raise questions concerning the necessity of having teachers at all, except to handle electronic media, making their role that of manipulator rather than teacher. Parents seem to have diminishing respect for the school, in general, and less for the faculty. The curriculum is largely in the hands of administrators, rather than teachers, and increased emphasis on standardized testing poses the danger of reducing the instructional role even further to educational clerk or drill master. The glory and depth of language have been considerably diminished out of fear of violating political correctness. A casual remark may cost a teacher her job, as may a goodhumored pat on the shoulder. Further, the world-wide web threatens to render formal instruction superfluous. In fact we must say that the moral and spiritual authority of educational institutions in general has been increasingly diminished, with teachers beginning to feel their roles obsolete since their influence on the instructional system is continually reduced. Many of them are given little control of their curriculum, and unable to see into the future in our troubled times, they themselves are tempted to view their dedication as irrelevant. But despite all the misunderstanding of the role of teachers, to ask what authority they have is a little like asking the same question about mothers or fathers. The teacherʼs authority is one of those ancient immemorial verities like a parentʼs that we ought to take for granted, trusting that itʼs simply in the nature of things. Poets over the centuries have given us images of the teacherʼs stature. The Titan Prometheus, the centaur Chiron, the goddess Athena, the archetypal wise Old Man in so many myths and legends, from Merlin, the wizard of ethereal legends, on up to
Prospero in The Tempest. And in all of these, the teacher is connected with a kind of “magic” or at least some sort of “occult” powers. This “sorcery” is an important symbol, for it signifies the ability to enchant and hence points to another dimension found in the ordinary. But after the great Merlin goes underground and, standing on the brink of modernity, Prospero renounces his art, the later teacher figures have had to work with something less, something not overtly magical. Richard Wilburʼs poem “Merlin Enthralled” expresses this loss. It pictures the devastation of the Knights of the Round Table after their desertion by Merlin. The great magician had become enamored of a sorceress named Niniane and had allowed himself at her bidding to enter a cave before her, whereupon she entombed him in it forever. Thus the magic of the world has been locked away from us. Wilburʼs poem portrays the devastation felt by the Knights of the Round Table at the loss of that entire dimension of mystery and magic representative of Merlin. So Merlin is gone. Ours is an age of unbelief in mystery. Teachers have to find an equivalent for this magic that can enable the young to pull swords from stones. For Fr. Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, this magic is “active love,” which transforms the painful events of the world. For some of us, itʼs the great books whose spell is just as potent today as ever. As you will see in your reading today, for Sam Fathers of Faulknerʼs Go Down, Moses the magic is the tribal lore of the Old People, who though theyʼve died have not quitted the earth. We have to have somewhere in our imaginations for Merlin and the great deer and the Old People—a dimension that surrounds our visible world, an aura, the spiritual presences without which our lives are diminished. What this implies is that we are making on this earth has about it some permanence in myth and memory. It remains and in some way it must be taught to our young and carried forward in their
lives, or else they live in a denuded
world, devoid of what Faulkner called the “old verities,” the intangibles. Weʼve been living in a pragmatic epoch for so long that such talk tends to sound weird, I know. But all our great artists testify to this invisible dimension in life. And just as priests and ministers preside over the things in our experience that are of another world, as a chrysalis becomes a butterfly, teachers preside over a spiritual dimension present in this life, one imbedded in memory, a necessary part of the human image, even if encountered only in the high moments. Teachers have to have some symbol of this spiritual realm to which learning takes us. They have to have some sort of power to induce a mystery, but in a radically neutralized world theyʼre allowed to use their “occult” power less and less until finally it disappears. One thinks of Glendowerʼs boast in Shakespeareʼs Henry IV, Part I: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” he says, and Hotspur replies cynically, “But when you call them, will they come?” Teachers are likely to feel themselves challenged in the same manner. We can call spirits from the “vasty deep,” but when we call them, will they come? Now remember Iʼm speaking not of another world but of something that surrounds this world. Memory you could call it perhaps, but it is a memory that belongs to all of us, a kind of racial memory—the human race—and weʼre incomplete without the feeling of what Faulkner calls the “old verities.” Yet though teachers are increasingly prevented from exercising their full “magical” powers in our schools, we can say at the outset that they are not and cannot be considered mere educational tools or equipment. Teachers bear a responsibility to the human race that is neither mechanical nor biological— emissaries for a heritage other than the DNA structure of the family. Thus it might best said that teachers provide a way to rise above fate. And in the same way, theyʼre not part of the political establishment. Their work is to impart not official knowledge, subject to the politics of the day, but a timeless heritage, a
body of wisdom belonging to the human race which teachers alone transmit. I said I would be speaking in exaggerated terms, but I want you to think about this strong statement, which I must admit seems on the face of it highly questionable. Surely learned scholars, writers, readers of every sort could be said to access that body of knowledge. Teachers represent—Iʼm not saying they possess—an entire body of knowledge. They represent it. Theyʼre a bridge to it by their very act of commitment no matter how inadequate their own education may be. Through their
“Teachers bear a responsibility to the human race that is neither mechanical nor biological— emissaries for a heritage other than the DNA structure of the family.”
very dedication to the task of learning they have a bridge to another world, we might say, which like magic they use for the purpose of transporting others. So itʼs not facts or any sort of ready-made knowledge that makes the effective teacher. Mechanical means can possibly handle better the transmission of facts. Itʼs a commitment to, a faith in, intangibles, qualities, moral and spiritual values that ride on the back of the information being 3
taught. Itʼs these signals of transcendence that the teacher gives out, an awareness of an arena of spiritual wisdom. Iʼm stirred to all these exaggerated statements by the figure of Sam Fathers, who somehow conjures up presences in the wilderness that educate the boy—an invisible quality present in the physical world around us, the sacramental dimension that matter possesses. The spiritual perception is necessary to the body politic. In fact itʼs irreplaceable in producing free persons. And though this depository of wisdom to which teachers bear witness is referred to in books or manuscripts, accessible to private individuals, it is through teachers that its life is preserved and confidently explored. Only the teacher approaches this wisdom, not to possess it but to point toward it, to profess that it exists. I donʼt mean to argue that teachers have or even should have encyclopedic knowledge. Iʼm suggesting that as teachers they have faith, faith in the transforming power of the realm of intangibles to which they bear witness, for they are members of a profession and a calling that guards a cumulative body of knowledge. As when we see doctors, we accept the fact that their authority stems from their representing the whole history of medicine, and as the lawyer, the great tradition of law, so it is with teachers—wisdom, knowledge, invisible presences lie behind them. The discipline represented by the teacher is the tradition of learning which has the power to transform those who encounter it. And so when we use the word transformation weʼre speaking of a kind of magic work by teachers, which satisfies an essential need in society. The practical world depends on the professions. Without lawyers, a society would certainly still have to try to arbitrate to make just rulings, as it would have to make medical diagnoses without doctors. But those decisions would be erratic and difficult, some brilliant and some misguided. And the same may be said of the teaching profession. People can learn without teachers and 4
certainly will nowadays from the world-wide web, but without a teacher, their learning is likely to be erratic, some of it enlightening, but a great deal of it misleading and even dangerous. Teachers are members of a heretofore respected profession, and their concern for learning is a concern for others and hence a service to the community. Society canʼt do without them, and what they profess apart from the specifics of their teaching is the moral and spiritual wisdom necessary for the survival of our civilization. Individuals can no doubt make contact with this vast reservoir of achieved knowledge on their own. But its full volume and in a sense its public dimension are lost if we ignore those who take as their life work its dissemination. Itʼs not that teachers know all that wisdom, but that they believe it exists, and the perspective that the classroom generates is a long memory, free of the prejudices of the day. This is why itʼs a violation to politicize the classroom. Its serene air offers a larger view of reality than the immediately relevant. The classroom opens up a timeless perspective. Teachers guard, interpret, and transmit the treasures of their discipline. Now Iʼm speaking primarily of literature since thatʼs my discipline, the one that Iʼve taken to heart and thatʼs guided my thought. But what Iʼm saying applies as well to other fields. Without the teaching profession, we would lose general literacy not only in the verbal but also in the mathematical realm. Weʼve already lost historical literacy among the young, because weʼve subverted that discipline into something called “social science.” If we completely relinquish our connection with the literary classics, weʼre deliberately choosing our downfall as a noble people. The authority of teachers comes not from their having an extraordinarily large body of information themselves but from a commitment to the preservation of their discipline, to putting on its perspective, consenting to be its medium, and using whatever spiritual powers
are available to affect its transmission. Teachers are the bearers of something they consider more significant than themselves, more important than any method, something of enormous value to the culture. They believe in “magic.” Just as in Go Down, Moses Sam Fathers conjures up the “Old People” to educate the boy, we as teachers have somehow to conjure up presences for our young because teachers believe that people can be transformed, and transforming is a kind of magic. And they make themselves vehicles for this transformation. Teachers trans-
“It’s not that teachers know all that wisdom, but that they believe it exists and that the perspective the classroom generates is a long memory, free of the prejudices of the day.” mit, attempting to become less and less their private, personal selves and more and more the conveyer of what they bear across to others. There are many metaphors for them. Socrates called teachers “midwives,” which is a good figure for at least part of their task. But I should prefer to think of teachers as guides, for they donʼt simply bring to birth something already present, but unawakened, though that is one of their tasks; they actually conduct
their students into new territory, first having imported, as it were, postcards from that territory into the classroom. They have to tell them about it as though they were a postcard from that region before they try to take them into it. There are so many metaphors that we could use to respond further to Socratesʼ midwife image. We can agree that teachers bring a new entity to birth in their pupils. What happens to them is internal, not external. But I would argue that teachers are able to infuse in their students a new kind of knowledge, something not innate, but stemming from another territory, not simply a memory hidden deep within their souls but a mystery that transforms. If teachers are the bearers of what is worth saving from the past, what they convey is memorable because in it is a record of humanity exceeding itself, a wisdom and a craft which when conveyed to the young in the present produces some sort of alchemy that we might call, with the poet Keats, “soul making.” It might be said that “soul-making,” what the Greeks call paideia, is the occupation of teachers even when they are drilling their pupils in facts and skills. In one of the oldest stories we have of the teacher, Aeschylusʼ Prometheus Bound, we are told that the Titan took pity on human beings in their ignorance. He says, “I found them witless, and gave them the use of their wits and made them masters of their minds. For men at first had eyes but saw to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear. Like the shapes of dreams, they dragged through their long lives and handled all things in bewilderment and confusion.” Prometheus taught them all the arts and crafts. Now the interesting aspect of this story, based on the ancient mythological fable, is that Prometheusʼ crime, stealing from the gods, is also described there apparently to represent the various skills he brought to the human race. Along with those, he brought dike—divine fire—the kind of knowledge that the gods had, intellect or right judg-
ment, which should have been formerly Zeusʼ alone. Prometheus taught these pitiful humans not only techne—craft—but dike—intellect. What the fable seems to indicate then is first, the lack of separation between intellect and technology, indicating that skills have to be formed by right judgment, and second, that the human race is changed in kind by possessing the divine fire of understanding, which is not innate but must be transmitted. Prometheus is our archetypal image of the teacher, someone who gives his life so that humankind can have dike and techne—understanding and technological skill. Socrates, too, attempts to change his pupils radically by making them see reality. The Platonic myth of the cave reveals a striking new kind of vision that genuine knowledge brings to people when the things of the senses, the passing show, can be revealed as mere shadows of the eternal forms. And in the work weʼre studying today, we see Isaac McCaslin, the heir of a wealthy family, being taught both wisdom and skills from Sam Fathers, son of a Native American chief and a Creole woman. In “The Old People,” the boy kills his first deer with his mentor at his side. ”ʼDont walk up to him in front,ʼ Sam said. ʻIf he aint dead, he will cut you all to pieces with his feet. Walk up to him from behind and take him by the horn first, so you can hold his head down until you can jump away.ʼ The boy did that— drew the head back and the throat taut and drew Sam Fathersʼ knife across the throat and Sam stooped and dipped his hands in the hot smoking blood and wiped them back and forth across the boyʼs face.” And he “had nothing to do now but stand straight and not let the trembling show. ʻDid he do alright Sam?ʼ his cousin McCaslin said. ʻHe done alright, Sam Fathers said.ʼ” The boy has passed his exam, and as with all exams he doesnʼt really need a grade. He simply needs to know that he “done alright.”ʼ Weʼre told that Sam has spent long hours preparing Isaac for this mo-
ment: “He taught the boy the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and when not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterwards.” Such skills are all-important to the boy, but they go hand in hand with a different kind of instruction, more important. Sam teaches Isaac how to see and respect the presences, the spiritual voices of the wilderness that represent the body of mystery of which the teacher is guardian: “The boy would just wait and then listen and Sam would begin talking about the old days and the People
“Teachers are able to infuse in their students a new kind of knowledge, something not innate, but stemming from another territory, not simply a memory hidden deep within their souls but a mystery that transforms.” whom he had not had time ever to know and so could not remember: . . . And as he talked about those old times and those dead and vanished men of another race from either that the boy knew, gradually to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boyʼs present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening, the men who walked through them actually walking in breath and air and casting 5
an actual shadow on the earth that they had not quitted.” And it would finally seem “that it was he, the boy, who was the guest here and Sam Fathersʼ voice the mouthpiece of the host.” I know of no passage in all literature that more fully captures the kind of magic the study of great things that produced the past for us works in the students. The great figures out of these works take over. When we bring Achilles into the classroom, he dominates the space and terrifies us. We ourselves are mesmerized by Helen as she walks the ramparts of Troy, and Odysseus charms us with his mind like the gods. Hamlet and Lear are so imposing that we come to feel that weʼre their guests and that we just might be considered intruders. What the boy learns is not tailored to his preferences or his abilities. Rather, he has to take in the material and have an openness to it. He has to accommodate himself to it, measure up to it. The wilderness is the symbol for this luminous presence for which the boy must be readied; to him, not yet ready to enter it but watching the hunters disappear into it, the wilderness seems “brooding, and secret, tremendous, almost inattentive.” Look at that phrase. How can you be “almost inattentive”? And yet it conveys the fact that the wilderness is watching and concerned with its own matters so that if it were completely inattentive it wouldnʼt notice your coming. But if itʼs “almost inattentive,” itʼs aware, so the wilderness is a presence. By the time heʼs allowed to go on a bear hunt with the men, weʼre told that “he had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the old bear.“ In the boyʼs imagination from having been taught, “it ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big. . . . the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his own wife and outlived all his sons.” 6
We can see from this passage that the boy has had two sorts of education. A classical one no doubt given by his cousin Cass in which he read the Iliad, because he identifies the old bear in this wilderness which is fated to fall with old Priam, the king of the doomed city besieged by the Greeks. All of this theory has been accompanied by the spiritual wisdom taught him by Sam Fathers along with practical instruction in the craft of hunting so that when he assumes his place with the hunters heʼs ready to take on the role of adult. The wilderness and the bear itself provide the rest of his instruction. When heʼs old enough to take part in the hunt, he goes to look for the bear, finding that if heʼs to encounter Old Ben, heʼll have to get rid of his gun and his watch and his compass, any of the aids on which heʼ s relied in the early stage of the game. When he becomes lost, he does as Sam has coached and drilled him. So Samʼs coaching and drilling in the techniques of woodsmanship along with the tales and visions of the past bring the boy into the territory of the bear. And the great presence finally shows himself as a theophany, like a god, to the boy, who is “tireless, eager, without doubt or dread, panting a little above the strong rapid little hammer of his heart, emerging suddenly into a little glade and the wilderness coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified—the tree, the bush, the compass and the watch glinting where a ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noonʼs hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste, walking for an instant into the sunʼs full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone.” This is one of the still moments of literature, a moment of vision almost unmatched. One thinks of Danteʼs sight of Beatrice, of Keatsʼ hearing the song of the nightingale. The boyʼs entire life will be shaped by this experience, which would not have been
possible for him without Samʼs taletelling and his coaching and drilling. Sam has been teaching him craft as well as instructing his intellect. The teacher does not produce the vision. The teacher must simply be convinced that the vision is possible, that what he teaches is real, and must ready the pupil himself to take the final steps. But the one doing the instruction and indeed the whole community of hunters must believe in the bear. And itʼs this aspect of the teacherʼs work thatʼs in danger today. Itʼs the belief in the mystery of the bear thatʼs being lost in our schools. We seem to be trying in-
“Teachers are the bearers of something they consider more significant than themselves, more important than any method, something of enormous value to the culture.” stead to produce relevance, youngsters who will aim at nothing higher than the present practices of society. In Isaac McCaslinʼs learning process, the boy experiences a paradox, both pride and humility, which is the response that the teacher seeks to evoke in the learner—pride in being given such material, humility in not being worthy to receive it. Sam Fathers is “the host,” the teacher. Itʼs through him that the boy is allowed to participate as a guest in some-
thing permanent and eternal. But itʼs not simply content that works the transformation in Isaac, though the old tales are necessary to engage him. He has to be made himself to see. And that means that he cannot just hear about the bear but must encounter it himself. There has been a long preliminary instruction for the boy. His grooming has been intense before heʼs taken along on the annual hunting excursion into the big woods where he takes his own first step in shooting the deer and later allows the bear itself to teach him by leading him into strange and dangerous territory. In this parable of the boyʼs education, weʼre told that if “Sam Fathers had been his mentor and the backyard rabbits and squirrels his kindergarten, then the wilderness the old bear ran was his college and the old male bear itself, so long unwived and childless as to have become its ungendered progenitor was his alma mater.” The teacher knows at what point to let the subject matter itself teach the pupils. After the teacher has summoned up the presences evoked in the pupilsʼ pride and humility, allowed them to undertake their first venture on their own, under the supervision of their elders—in this instance, shooting the deer—he turns them over to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom on their own, watching, of course, back at camp and helping to interpret the experience later on. But the bear itself—in my analogy. the text being studied, the problem to be solved— teaches the novice in a way that teachers themselves cannot. Thus the teacher becomes less and less as the pupil becomes more. But the authority of the teacher is not diminished. The process of instruction has convinced pupils of another dimension to reality, has taught them legends and skills, encouraged them to take their first steps into that realm, and finally turned them over to it, as weʼre told of Isaacʼs education. These passages in Go Down, Moses are, in part, about the way in which the teacherʼs transformative power functions by first creating in
the pupil a belief in something invisible and valuable beyond the immediately relevant, and this part of the task is accomplished through the teacherʼs voice. Reading the great texts alone will not do it. Itʼs through the teacherʼs guidance, through the evocation of presences, the conjuring up of heroic tales of the past so that its heroes are recognized as still living, that the learner is transformed. This is a major part of the educational process, making students understand what has preceded them in the discipline theyʼre studying. And it occurs through coaching and drilling, as Faulkner puts it, and finally by taking students into the “forest” of ideas and visions and allowing them to confront the bear itself. All this has to be governed by the teacher. And though we have to grieve that society does not recognize the true nature of this task, we still know that the need for it exists, and we still know that weʼre preparing the young not just for success, but for struggles and hardships. And some of us intuit, in our time, that those hardships may be greater than ordinary. But we are consoled then by the fact that some of our students will see the bear. And they do that on their own. Thatʼs the point I want to make. The teacher readies the pupil for the insight, but the achievement of the insight is the pupilʼs. What I have been hoping to say, then, getting back to our text for today, is that perhaps we should notice that the teacher figure in these stories, Sam Fathers, though heʼs descended from Native American royalty, occupies an ambiguous place in society. The boyʼs cousin, Cass Edmonds, and the hunters look up to him and the boy reveres him, but he lives in a poor cabin. And though he is honored, heʼs not a part of ordinary society. Heʼs in a class by himself, commanding his magic, summoning up the presences, and engendering beliefs in his pupils. Like us, heʼs above and apart from the society that works by the hour. Our reward lies in seeing our students encounter the great deer, and knowing that if
they persist, some of them will inevitably go on, on their own, and encounter the bear.
Dr. Louise S. Cowan was inaugural holder of the Louise Cowan Chair of Literature at the University of Dallas and is a Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She is formerly Chair of the English Department and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Dallas. She and her husband Dr. Donald Cowan were central and instrumental in the creation and building of both the University of Dallas and the Dallas Institute. In 1983, she conceived of a summer seminar for high school English teachers and sought funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for this two-summer cycle of classes. The NEH funded the programs for four years, in spite of the fact that it compromised two of the NEHʼs primary standards for summer seminars: having a regional focus and studying an extensive list of classic works in each class. This summer seminar—out of which all of the programs of the Dallas Instituteʼs Louise and Donald Cowan Center for Education have been conceived—is now called the Sue Rose Summer Institute for Teachers. It will convene for its 30th consecutive summer in 2013. After the first summer class in 1984 and also on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Summer Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities called it a "model for the nation." For this program, among other contributions, Dr. Louise Cowan was awarded what is now called the National Humanities Medal in 1991, the nation's highest award for work in the humanities. During her long career, Dr. Cowan has received numerous awards for her achievements in teaching and advancing liberal education. Dr. Cowan has written widely on the American South and Faulkner, and also on the Russian novel. She is one of two literary scholars since Aristotle who have conceived of a comprehensive genre theory of literature, the subject of four volumes of essays for which she has served as the general editor.
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The Beauty of Learning By Onyema Nweze
In Dostoevskyʼs Crime and Punishment, readers are introduced to the well-educated, highly intelligent Raskolnikov, who develops and attempts to prove his idea that the world is made up of two types of people: the ordinary, who are obedient preservers of the present, and the extraordinary, who are law-breaking “lords of the future.” As a member of the “extraordinary” few, Raskolnikov convinces himself that he has the reason and the right to kill for the greater good: “ʼOne death, and a hundred lives in exchange . . . simple arithmetic.ʼ” This audacious act actually serves as a catalyst for a much deeper lesson that Raskolnikov learns, and in the end, this proud, educated young man humbles himself as he learns to submit to his moral obligation both to nature and the world. In Dostoevskyʼs protagonist, readers bear witness to the transformative power of learning, which, according to Donald Cowan, is “an internal action . . . whereby information presented to the senses is transformed by the imagination into knowledge.” We see Raskolnikov move from hearing of his need to confess his crime and “kiss the earth [he has] desecrated,” to accepting that “it was not in his nature to overstep the bounds of the law.” With “a single spark kindled in his spirit,” then, Raskolnikov falls “to the ground… with pleasure and joy.” Because this lesson happens for an educated man, in some important ways, Dostoevsky illustrates the difference between “learning” and “education” similar to the way in which Donald Cowan describes them, saying “education is an external process sponsored by society for its ongoing welfare.” Further, using an educated man as his protagonist, Dostoevsky seems to expose the problem of cultivating a 8
mind without its having experienced the internal action of what Cowan calls learning that can “fill a deep human hunger.” With this image of Raskolnikov illustrating, for me, Cowanʼs definitions of learning and education, I am reminded of how beautiful learning is at the Dallas Instituteʼs Cowan Center. In this place, I and countless other educators “fill [that] deep human hunger” time and time again. Armed with a great book and Louise Cowanʼs genre theory, the faculty model learning while they guide learners in an exploration of works that “shed light upon and transform existence,” as Donald Cowan
“The Institute is a place where I have repeatedly experienced the satisfaction and enjoyment of learning, and these experiences have transformed me both as a learner and as an educator.” describes it. “By revealing larger and larger realms outside of the text,” a great book such as the Odyssey continues to teach new lessons about leadership; Beloved continues to teach new lessons about sacrifice; the Iliad continues to teach lessons about pride, and Crime and Punishment continues to teach lessons about redemption. These are in no way the only lessons learned from these great works, and my prior description here of what Crime and Punishment has taught me about the difference between education and learning suggests the depth of knowledge that can be gained from the repeated study of great literature. This is the beauty of learning, what the Cowan Center offers educators, a deeper understanding of life and the human condition, hence a better sense of self and purpose.
After having attended both the Epic and the Tragedy/Comedy Summer Institutes, I, like others both before and after me, have come to find solace in the beauty of learning. The Institute is a place where I have repeatedly experienced the satisfaction and enjoyment of learning, and these experiences have transformed me both as a learner and as an educator. As a learner, this place has rekindled my curiosity and passion for study. As an educator, it has inspired me to nurture this desire and hunger for learning in the students with whom I have the honor of working. Inspiration is another benefit of the beauty of learning; it creates a ripple effect in the educational system as we who have been inspired pass this along. After being transformed by learning, we who teach and lead are compelled to re-create in some way the beauty of learning—in our districts, perhaps, if we are superintendents, in our schools if we are principals, and in our classrooms if we are teachers. In short, we tend to leave here with a clearer understanding of the difference between “education” and “learning,” and although there are specific programs in place—from state standards and assessments to district and campus initiatives—educators who have been touched by the beauty of learning know that students must experience this beauty, too. They must learn and be transformed by learning. Our work, after all, is not only to prepare students for college and the work force, as so many district creeds declare, but through the transformative power of learning, to equip students to love learning so that they can take in the beauty of human life. Onyema Nweze is a Language Arts Instructional Coach in the Dallas ISD. She holds a Master of Humanities degree and is an alumna of the 2006-7 Summer Institutes.