A belated response, and some penultimate thoughts on this book.

When it comes to Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters, Oook is right on all counts, in my view. (Great set of Steiner aphorisms on Wikiquote, too–many thanks, oook, for the link.) To awe, regret, and irritation, though, I’ll add a feeling of immense satisfaction, in the sense that Steiner gets at the depths of the experience of teaching and learning in ways few writers do. I don’t know, but I wonder, whether some of the feeling of “stuck-ness” folks overtaking folks like Will Richardson comes from a nagging sense that much edu-chatter, to which I’ve added much chattering of my own, is fine so far as it goes but doesn’t go nearly far enough.

What does “far enough” mean? Is it a radical re-thinking of the entire enterprise, a la Illich? Is it an unwearying critique of meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss thinking, a la Stephen Downes? Is it patient, insightful, inspiring narratives of the teaching experience, a la Barbara Ganley or Steve Greenlaw?

Yes. Many times yes.

For me this morning, thinking about teaching and learning and Steiner’s magisterial survey of how those activities have been imagined and portrayed in human culture, “far enough” means also intensively, obsessively focused on relationship, charisma, passion, intensity, the fire in a teacher’s belly and the light in a student’s eyes. So far as I can tell, these are in some respects unfashionable thoughts, but I come to them via my own experience, not just as a teacher, but as a student. I hear again and again that we must not teach as we were taught. I recoil from that instruction. My students would be most fortunate if I could, indeed, teach as I was taught, for I had masterful teachers whom I struggle to channel in my own teaching every day.

I know I am not alone. Pick up a memoir, and look to see the teachers who changed the writer’s life, often with something entirely informal or even casual, like pinning an artwork onto a bulletin board. That’s how Robert Hughes saw his first De Chirico, back in his Catholic high school in Australia in the 1950’s. Of course that casual gesture was the overspill of his teacher’s active, questing mind, one that constantly left bread crumbs for his students, furnishing their experience with every succulent intellectual morsel in his cupboard. As the Richardsons once said of Milton’s poetry, the teacher obviously strove to surround his students with sense, to charge their environment with meaning, attention, passion, to make all moments potentially transformative.

That’s a high standard, but I’ve known teachers who could do it. I’ve seen it happen. I remember what it was like to be, not in “a” classroom, but in their classroom. Sometimes the air was so charged at the end of a class meeting that I could not imagine another teacher being bold enough to enter that space.

Steiner’s book is satisfying for me because it insists on the power of these human interactions as absolutely fundamental to a deep understanding of teaching and learning.

“[Leonard Bernstein] congratulating Nadia Boulanger, internationally celebrated teacher and musician, after she became the first woman to conduct the Orchestra in a full concert, February, 1962” (from “The Bernstein Years,” booklet included with the boxed set of Bernstein conducting the NY Philharmonic in Beethoven’s nine symphonies).

One of Steiner’s more haunting examples is that of Nadia Boulanger. I’m fascinated by larger-than-life personalities generally, and Boulanger has always been one of those who fascinated me most. (In fact, now might be a good time for me to seek out a biography–can anyone point me to a good one?) She taught a staggering array of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. Their chorus of praise for her was almost unanimous. Here’s what Steiner says about this master:

No one who has not been a Boulanger pupil can articulate what must have been the spell of her teaching. The dicta tend to be of monumental generality: ‘I don’t believe in the teaching of aesthestics unless it is combined with a personal interchange.” To her Radcliffe choristers: “Do not merely the best you can; do better than you can!” “May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” Or, in 1945,: “The teacher is but the humus in the soil. The more you teach, the more you keep in contact with life and its positive results. All considered, I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and the beneficiary.” Ten years later: “When I teach, I throw out the seeds. I wait to see who grabs them … Those who do grab, those who do something with them, they are the ones who will survive. The rest, pfft!” And in the Musical Journal for May 1970: “One can never train a child carefully enough … we must do everything we can for the one who can do very much, and it is unfair to our human justice. But human justice is a small justice” (how Plato and Goethe would have agreed).

Plenty to argue with there, and yet for me there are home truths that burn in all these quotations. Agency, inspiration, dramatic and stealthy and oversize and subtle encounters with master and apprentice learners in highly charged contexts, a sense of occasion and a drive toward meaning: these may be monumentally general dicta, as Steiner observes, but they are too often overlooked in ed-talk. Without them, however, I hear tinkling gongs and clanging cymbals. I have no quarrel with second things like workforce preparation, credentialling, assessment, issues of scaling and sustainability and support. These are vital things. But they are, finally, always, second things. When they serve first things, the priorities are straight.

Steiner concludes his section on Boulanger with words that would likely provoke many howls of outrage among my colleagues, here and elsewhere, perhaps rightly so in some respects. I myself feel that social justice cannot be incompatible with recognizing excellence in human accomplishment–but of course, finding that compatibility can be a very fraught endeavor. Still, I want to close this post with Steiner’s assessment of Nadia Boulanger’s gifts:

Anecdotes illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s technical mastery abound. They tell of her ability to spot instantaneously the minutest error or oversight in a student’s performance; of her anger at any mode of compositional or executant bluff; of a memory beyond compare. One suspects, however, that the genius lay elsewhere, that it would have characterized whatever discipline she taught. Boulanger’s engagement in the act of teaching was absolute, “totalitarian” in the rarest sense. Her axiomatic insight that talent, that creativity are not subject to social justice underwrote not only her own elitisim but that of her students. She gave them the confidence to become what they were. This is a Master’s supreme donation. As Ned Rorem put it, Nadia Boulanger was quite simply “the greatest teacher since Socrates.”

I can readily understand how provocative or even repellent some of this description may appear. Yet I also wonder what positive things we can learn from it as we continue the conversation.

“May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” I feel I should begin every class with these words. How small my efforts, how large my hopes!