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The Art of Teaching (1950).(Review)
The Art of Teaching (1950) By Gilbert Highet
Teaching is not a science. So underscores Gilbert Highet at the outset of The Art of Teaching. 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 about the classics.
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 types of pupils, and the respective virtues of the lecture and tutorial systems, he devotes one-third of the book to "great teachers and their pupils" and to teachers "in everyday life"--none of whom are "educators," as far as today's professionals are concerned. 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. Teachers in everyday life include everyone from fathers and mothers and husbands and wives to clergymen and advertisers. (Higher is especially fond of the Jesuits and of nineteenth-century pedagogues.)
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 is exhibited in Highet's 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 in the same situation breathing a sigh of relief: "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' extracurricular lives. Teaching, 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 social workers also lack 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 often hostile towards religion--spiritual lives. Today's activist teachers have so much time and energy for ruining students' extracurricular lives not because they are more dedicated than their predecessors but because their indifference toward trivialities like grammar, math, and history frees up their energy for more urgent pedagogical concerns like sex, death, and race.
A good teacher, says Highet, has three ...
- Gilbert Highet
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...guides do exist, notably Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (New York: Alfred A. Knopf...and The Art and Craft of Teaching, ed. Margaret Morganroth...Harvard Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning, 1982), they...
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...and it hasn't been easy. What is behind my thoughts on this is the following. In his The Art of Teaching, the incomparable Gilbert Highet (if you know his Poets in a Landscape [New York: Knopf, 1957] you know what I mean) spends some...
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...for intellectual freedom to mutate into the scornful, condescending amusement that slights the freedom of others and that Gilbert Highet perceives behind satire.(9) In fact, such linkage reverts to James's very first novelistic comedian, the carefree...
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...and Claudian," adds Curtius. "For the new poetics of the twelfth century, both ranked as model authors." And though Gilbert Highet says that Dante "deliberately ignores the late classical writers and the early Christian poets like Prudentius," he also...
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...from solipsism? In a volume with this title, such questions should at least be asked. The editors start by attacking Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition of 1949 as typifying a reverential approach to antiquity; in their view a new generation of...
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...background information about Posidippus himself. But to understand how these new poems change our sense of the poet, consider Gilbert Highet's description of Posidippus in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970)."His chief theme," Highet wrote, "is sex...
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- Magazine article from: New Criterion Kimball, Roger April 1, 2003 700+ words
...unpleasant former keeper. ("`I paid you so much then,' he says, `and a bit more later, and more that other time.'") Gilbert Highet, the great classical scholar and an expert on Juvenal, called it "one of the most shocking poems ever written" but also...