Light, Truth and Whatever教师力量的全部秘密

Andrew Delbanco must be a great teacher. A longtime faculty member at Columbia, he is devoted to the development of his students as individuals, and recognizes that their time in college should be formative: “They may still be deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility.” Like most professors devoted to teaching, he has no interest in telling undergraduates what to think, but he does want to draw them toward a sense of skepticism about the status quo and to a feeling of wonder about the natural world. College, he tells us, is a time to learn to “make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena,” to see things from another’s point of view and to develop a sense of ethical responsibility. At a time when many are trying to reduce the college years to a training period for economic competition, Delbanco reminds readers of the ideal of democratic education.

In “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” he recalls this ­ideal’s roots in English and American Protestantism. In this country, education was never supposed to be only about imparting information. It has long included character development — turning the soul away from selfish concerns and toward community. Delbanco cites Emerson’s version of this turning: “The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening.” Even secular teachers are trying to “get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep.”

By the end of the 19th century, this commitment to character formation, to sustaining “curiosity and humility,” as Delbanco writes, was in sharp tension with a commitment to professionalization. Colleges were becoming universities, which meant they were getting into the business of research. Community took a back seat to expertise, and schools once exclusively devoted to undergraduate learning sought prestige through the development of graduate and professional schools.

With the substantial increase in the number of students wanting to pursue a college degree and the expansion of the number of fields of learning that schools were expected to cover, the dream of a “common learning experience” for undergraduates faded in favor of offering a plethora of courses from which to choose. Modern universities are meant to produce knowledge through specialization, and they often reward faculty members by giving them “relief” from teaching. Our best universities are adept at steering resources to their most productive researchers, but the undergraduate curriculum gets little more than lip service. “Very few colleges tell their students what to think,” Delbanco notes, and “most are unwilling even to tell them what’s worth thinking about.”