The Alpha and the Omega

“To know psychology,” William James warned at the turn of the last century in his Talks to Teachers “is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers.”  He argues:

To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us.  That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

He continually admonished teachers to expect little from psychology, that the “’boom’ in psychology” has fomented “portentous ideas” and given what he called the docile nature of teachers, especially teachers of young children, they are too ready to put their faith in psychology.  

Today, we acquiesce routinely, unquestioningly, in the advice of experts around us: from psychology, still, with its increasing range of specializations, but now neuroscience, computer science, and even business have “portentous ideas” that offer “best practices” for teachers. Yet the amount of science that a teacher needs to know, James argued, “might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.”  This additional knowledge, he says, “fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles, — to get a stereoscopic view.”

We have looked at the world through the lens of science, monocularly, for so long, now, that it’s hard to even imagine different seeing.

When I was twelve, I went to the optometrist and was fitted with glasses.  I remember my astonishment, walking outside and seeing leaves on trees in sharp outline, not a blurry green, after all, but variegated, subtle, sharp, unspeakably beautiful.

What might come into focus for teaching if we viewed it stereoscopically?

What is the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, this happy tact, this ingenuity? Is it different now more than a century later when, increasingly, the student is not before us? How do we then know what definite things to say and do?

But connecting across distance is not new. How is it that a poet knows? How could John Milton, for example, at a distance even our latest technology has not yet been able to cross, pierce my heart in an instant and shake something in me that matters still.

“Every great poet,” William Wordsworth said, “is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing.”

This alpha and omega: to see the unspeakably beautiful other and to touch, somehow, the living connecting between us.