A Lost Art: Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching Turns 50

By Nicholas Stix

The Art of Teaching
by Gilbert Highet
Vintage/Random House, 1989 (1950),
268 pp., $11.00.

March/April, 2001
The American Enterprise

Teaching is NOT a science. So underscores at the outset of The Art of Teaching its author, Gilbert Highet. Highet (1906-78), a sort of "Yankee Don," was an Oxford-educated Scot who spent a long and illustrious career at Columbia University teaching, and writing on, the classics.

The Art of Teaching may have just turned fifty years old, but I can think of no timelier book than this classic, which has remained continuously in print, as a corrective to almost a century of progressive pedagogical destruction.

Gilbert Highet warns the reader that he will not be offering any curricular proposals, or telling us how to teach particular subjects. His concern is with teaching in the broadest possible sense. Thus, while he discusses with great candor and not a little irony different types of pupils, and the respective virtues of the lecture and tutorial systems, he devotes one-third of the book to teachers, none of whom are educators, as far as today's "professionals" are concerned: "Great teachers and their pupils," and teachers "in everyday life." Highet points out that we are, all of us, constantly learning from, and teaching others, whether or not we are conscious of this, or even wish to do so.

The great teachers and students range from the Sophists on through the 19th and 20th centuries. He is especially fond of the Jesuits, and of 19th-century pedagogues. Teaching in everyday life concerns everyone from fathers and mothers, and husbands and wives, to clergymen and advertisers.

There is a delightfully generous pragmatism to this man, who, just as he is able to appreciate parents' primary roles in education, is able to learn from Soviet and Nazi educators alike.

In some ways this book is quaint, and in others prophetic; but in every way, it is of perennial interest to the intellectually curious and spiritually hungry.

Its quaintness obtains in telling, in shocked tones, of the then-extraordinary case of the school boy who urinated on a textbook in front of his teacher and class. Today, I can see more than a few New York City assistant principals breathing a sigh of relief, upon being confronted with the same situation: 'Well -- it's not like he raped somebody!'

The book becomes prophetic, when Highet explains why teachers cannot also be social workers charged with improving their students' extra-curricular lives. Teaching, as Highet points out, is exhausting work. At the end of the school day, a dedicated teacher has no energy left to solve problems for which he has no expertise. (Were Highet alive today, I think he'd see that no one possesses such expertise.)

But we live in an age of activist teachers, who claim to be able to fix students' sex, family, and -- though they are hostile towards religion -- spiritual lives. Today's teachers have so much time and energy for ruining students' extracuricular lives not because they are more dedicated than their predecessors. Rather, teachers' indifference toward trivialities such as grammar, math, and history, frees their energy up for urgent pedagogical concerns such as sex, death, and race.

A good teacher, says Highet, has three primary characteristics.

"First, and most necessary of all ... he must know what he teaches. This sounds obvious; yet it is not always practiced."

Second, a teacher must LIKE what he teaches. Highet tells of an ignoramus he once encountered who was trusted to teach introductory French, yet who had never read Moliere, and "never will. I don't really like French at all. What I like is basketball. We've got a great little team at Woodside.

Highet continues that, "The third essential of good teaching is to like the pupils."

Well, that's three strikes against most of today's public school teachers and tenured, university professors.

Ideas Highet champions that were already then unfashionable, include teachers' need to have, and to teach, will-power. He similarly praises the central role of a powerful memory in teaching and learning, which today's progressive pedagogues deride as "mere rote memorization." And although writing at a time of relative safety in the schools, Highet addresses the problem of thuggish boys, for which he has a simple, no-nonsense solution: Such boys must be taught by MEN who themselves exude the sort of masculinity and toughness that the boys will respect.

While Highet does not polemicize, he is at sword's point with much of his age's progressive pedagogy, and is anathema to the radical feminists/multiculturalists, who for the past thirty years, have eliminated more intellectually demanding, pre-1970 literature, have henpecked the teaching profession and teacher education, and emasculated the boys in our nation's classrooms, all the while denying responsibility for what they have wrought. ("Education merely reflects society.")

To gauge how far we have fallen, and thus how much we need to re-learn Highet's lessons, consider the contumely recently heaped on him by some American feminist graduate students of teacher education at amazon.com (where this writer's serious reviews are unofficially banned):

"... a very out-dated [sic] book that should not be used in any classroom."

"His exultation of the Jesuit methods of teaching focusing on memorization and recitation are very out of line with current educational theory" [amen!].

"Highet, the author, does a very good job of ostracising [sic] his readers with his use of elaborate vocabulary and his extreme use of historical figures I have barely heard of."

As Descartes (1596-1650), who was educated by the Jesuits, pointed out, all education depends on memory. Which raises the question, Why would progressive/constructivist pedagogues be so hostile towards any method that increases children's memory?

The most general answer I came up with was anti-intellectualism. If children grow up to be citizens with poor powers of concentration, short attention spans, and the weak memories that flow from them -- the exact same characteristics which "progressive" pedagogues decry, and blame on the mass media -- they will be all the more pliable for the progressives' experiments in social engineering.

Another, in some ways more sinister explanation beckons, as well: The progressives wish to rewrite history at will, and so seek not only to weaken the individual student's memory, but to destroy the collective memories of civilization.

You don't have to be a parent or educator, in order to enjoy reading Gilbert Highet. But if you are responsible for a child's education, you might consider employing the principles he enumerates as part of a home-schooling program, in the selection of a private school, or as a subversive program for when your child is at home from government school.