Art Criticism - The State University of New York

But the same basic relation of teacher-student remains in tact at all levels of
schooling. By the time of college and graduate school, students are adults,
eligible to vote and to go to go off to war to die, but they remain positioned as
subordinate to the teacher. The university professor is defined in our culture
as a specialist, an expert in field of study, hence the possessor of certain truths.
Lateral interactions amongst the students are rendered to a minimum; students
mostly enter into competitive relations and on occasion help each other with
assignments. But the primary relation is that between professor and student,
exemplified in the standard classroom arrangement of students sitting side by
side facing not each other but the teacher, who stands at the front of the room
pronouncing the truth of the matter at hand.
We like to convince ourselves that the humanities and social sciences
are requisite for students becoming citizens, but traditional classroom
formats forestall students engaging in practices of mutual recognition. Pastoral
power is directed towards normalizing thought. This derails the development
of what Kant called Miindigkeit, the maturity to think for oneself without
final appeal to an external authority. 14 By interacting with each other in practices
of respectful deliberation, students become more active learners and less
slavish to authority. They become autonomous thinkers not so much by going
to the library and writing a paper to satisfy the teacher's expectations (which
positions the teacher as the master who authorizes the truth of the student's
thought), but primarily by interacting with each other in open formats of dia-
10gue. IS Yet our educational procedures and assumptions - the primacy of
lecturing, our deep seeded positivistic and monological views of truth, the
necessity of "careful" grading - do much to counter students becoming a
community of mature, autonomous thinkers.
Classroom Obligations
Having outlined the plight of community in modernity and how college
schooling contributes to this malaise, I want now to reflect on the phenomenology
of teaching, especially as regards obligations in the classroom.
This sections intends to point out how we teachers tend to conflate the pedagogical
obligation to educate students with the administrative imperative to
normalize and discipline a variegated student body.16
In being a teacher, one inevitably endeavors to be a good teacher, to
teach well. That is to say, the good of teaching is embodied in its practice. But
what counts as this good is not a fixed end, but an open field of possible
outcomes. For there are many ways of succeeding at teaching, and some of
these are never known in advance. Nevertheless, we can surmise that these
outcomes all directly or indirectly involve the education of students, so that
the good of teaching always has in the end an obligation to others. The
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