Transcript
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Since I have been catapulted amongst you, to my own great surprise, you haven't known that I would be here yesterday--I hadn't known--and all this has been improvised. We certainly suffer under a number of handicaps. I think the only decent thing I can do to you without impertinence is at least to recognize these handicaps and to speak to you about some barriers to teaching.
You are teachers. That's my first handicap. I can't teach you easily. You know it all, already. But there are some other handicaps within the teaching process. And I think that it is better to face them frankly, than to gloss over them with some blind idealism. And I think you will find it quite interesting, that only by facing barriers to teaching, it can be really made to happen, the great task, the greatest honor that man has when he speaks, that he is allowed to teach.
May I illustrate this by some personal stories? One is a personal experience, a kind of family quarrel. I married into a family with five sisters, and so the various brothers-in-law pose certain problems to each other. One of my brothersin-law, who married into the same family, and I came home from the war, both in uniform. And in this home, we appeared to be both officers; also we both were teachers. I was a university professor at the time and he was a grade school teacher. The uniform of course made us look very much alike. But one day, we had a flare-up about teaching. He had gone to a teachers' college. And he defended the point of view that the normal situation for teaching was a classroom with at least 30 men in class, sitting there and receiving instruction.
And I held that, from my own youth on, I have always liked to teach, but I thought the only normal situation was that between a mother or a father, and that -- his son, saying something that had to be said to him at the right time in a personal situation. And this clash was quite -- went quite deep. He felt attacked in his most professional honor. He had learned in a teachers' college how to teach. I hadn't. I was just a university professor. And you know, we don't learn how to teach. I leave this open to you: what is the normal teaching situation?
The second story: a friend of mine was a corporal in the First World War. And at division quarter- -- headquarters, they discovered that they had a great scholar in their midst--a poor soldier, but a great scholar--and an historian. And so they had trench warfare, and were very bored, and they wanted to get some
entertainment. And so they decided to get this unshaven corporal from the trench, up to headquarters. But before, he was looked over by one of the men: was he presentable? And the man who -- the officer very poignantly asked the corporal, "Well, can you really lecture on history, on world history? Our general would like { } if you say -- speak on universal history, { }. Well, but how much time do you need?"
The corporal said, "From one minute to 10 years."
"Well," he said, "That's impossible. How could you do -- teach world history in one minute?"
"Oh," he said, "In one sentence: world history begins in the East and moves slowly forward to the West."
This is another handicap to teaching. How much time should be given to it? A minute? Ten years? You know there are eternal students who like to go to school for the rest of their lives -- a protected and sheltered situation. And sometimes they tell us that we only teach because we want to be in such sheltered situations. You know: those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
I have three barriers to teaching. You are teachers. I come too late. We have 30 men -- 189 I'm told, right here. It is too impersonal. I cannot speak to a mass. And the third handicap, you remember from the -- my friend the corporal, it's too general. The less time given to teaching, the more I must generalize on the topic. So here I am; my handicap as a teacher is that I come too late. Everybody has already something written on his brain. Old D‚scartes said, "It is terrible. I wasted 20 years with misconceptions and prejudices, and now I have to begin, you see, to become a semantic blank again."
But nobody wants to become a semantic blank; he was an exception. And so every teacher comes to me when he wants to be with students in a college, for example--or when I wish to be with you--I come too late. That's my handicap. You, as students, you see, are offended, because it is too impersonal, what I have to say. I treat you as my brother-in-law, { } {he shouldn't teach -- treat the class}. And my tricks, my gimmicks. And Number 3--we're talking about the subject in too-general terms. { }. Because we have no time.
Now this has to do with the whole question: is there time for teaching? Life is after all running out. You only have one life to live, so why give so much time to teaching; why not go on acting? And isn't the whole -- our whole educational process, a tremendous waste? It's just a -- putting people on ice.
These are the barriers to teaching. And I wish to say that every classroom reflects these three barriers, or handicaps, or deficiencies. Every classroom--look at these classrooms. It is impersonal. It is too general. You can teach anything in this room. It's not a special situation, that when you go to the airplane itself and can -- make people feel that this is one specific airplane, The Sacred Cow. And Number 3. The -- too general, too impersonal, and too late. That's reflected in this classroom. And because everybody's { }, so that everybody's waiting for the bell.
The result is not only boredom. You know this problem, and that people go to sleep, and that people let you talk, and sit back, and you have perhaps one student who really follows all the time. There is a result from the -- our barriers to teaching which is much more serious, and on which I'm going to speak a little more specifically, I hope.
Any classroom defies the presence of the human soul or of the divine spirit. I always tell my students in a classroom, "You'd better deny the existence of God and the soul." This may seem to you a far flight from your practical teaching, but I -- you will see that it is very practical. In your instruction, and in my teaching, I -- we have to reckon with this resistance that any decent person will speak of his highest beliefs only when it is inevitable and necessary. When a general has to address his troops before D-Day, he has to speak the truth, that the life of man must be sacrificed for a greater goal. He has to say that. But you and I, here in this classroom, have absolutely no reason to speak in this unreal, and general, and impersonal situation about such highfalutin things. And we have to, I think, admit: there is a predicament, in our situation in any classroom that we must cheapen -- cheapen all our aspirations.
Yesterday I had a conference, and one of my friends there resented very much the use of the word "inspiration." And I said, "Well, I haven't used it. I'm not going to use this in a conference room. I'm not going to desecrate the word -- 'inspiration' by using it before colonels and staff officers." It's an unreal situation, a conference. I don't have to mention it, so I'm silent about the {voice}.
Gentlemen, any classroom omits those things which we only know in an emergency, and which only are at one moment in our life inevitably fixed. Because the classroom is not the right moment; it is out of time, and out of space. What I have said about too late -- about impersonal, and about too-general means just this, gentlemen. Please take this; for one moment it may stun you, but it's a very simple statement. The classroom is unreal. It's an unreal situation. And about the most real, you cannot talk in an unreal situation. You laugh it off. You must have a sense of humor. Cracking jokes in the classroom, gentlemen, is the way out, as you well know. You keep your attention by a sense of humor in a
classroom. Anybody who cannot crack one joke during a lecture shouldn't teach.
That takes the place of the divine, this little {devil}. He -- we make clear to the students -- I, by provoking laughter, you see, that there is a lacuna, that our reality, that our here, little situation, is just preparatory to life. Very important, gentlemen, that we prepare the real situation. And therefore we must admit one thing, which I always tell my friends in -- in the divinity schools, that in their study halls, of all these divinity schools, God is treated as absent. Because if they would know -- think that He was present, they wouldn't talk about Him.
Now I feel, gentlemen, that it is -- would be a real contribution of the military that you would make this -- bring this distinction into your teaching in our colleges. In our colleges, you see, atheism is rampant, because they -- it comes from the very real situation of the classroom. In as far as the classroom is something real, it is better treated if we do not speak there about the highest things, but keep them out. It's perfectly natural.
Believe me. You however know something, because you are in uniform, about the fact that the teaching is just one part of life. There is leadership, there is command, there is war, there is peace, discipline. And -- for you, obviously instruction is something exceptional, something interposed, intermittent; it isn't the whole story of your own situation. Therefore I think you can be much more readily confronted with the deficiencies of the classroom. My colleagues, you see, as any profession, do not like this statement--that the spirit is absent from the classroom--because they do not wish to hear that there are any limitations to the teaching profession. That's what my brother-in-law taught, you see, he didn't understand that it was anything amiss in teaching such a teachers' college class, you see, according to the latest {tricks}. And -- he just hated the idea that a father could perhaps teach better, you see, than a professional, because then you can't unionize, and you can't plead for higher wages.
So I -- don't forget your starting point as officers. When you go into teaching, face brutally, frankly the deficiencies of the classroom. Because perhaps then we may be able to overcome them. Let me go on from this statement, and because I now hear your criticism inside of myself--after all, I make too much solemnity about -- during the whole process; you instruct people, you see, and you don't teach. Of course instruction, that's very simple; you appeal to the mentality, to the mental processes of an individual, or of a mass of people; you are -- use this famous logic, which I have never met in any good teacher. And you -- you produce results by pulling it off.
Therefore I want to be -- I would like now to, in a second part, to analyze -- the teaching process itself. The barriers to teaching draw attention to the fact
that by itself, in a classroom, instruction -- mere instruction may prevail, because the appeal to the logic, and the mind, and the reason of the student of course is much easier than it is -- the appeal to his personality in a classroom. And since it is impersonal, and since I come too late to your pers- -- in your personal development, you see, I'd better keep out of trouble by only talking "2- -- 2 and 2 is 4." Question { }: is it possible only to instruct?
Now I hold--and let me, because we have so little time, you will forgive me, I'm just in the same predicament as my -- the corporal, I have to throw out my rule of thumb--that in every process where a man who knows speaks to a man who does not know, from a sense of duty--there are three elements: teaching, instruction, and training. These are not the terms of empty verbiage, because they are addressed to three elements in the student which you and I will verify. Instruction appeals to the mind. Teaching appeals to the person, to the soul. Training to the body. You train a man to do things with his own hands, with his own feet, with his whole body. And you -- train anybody. Teach- -- instruction is universal; it appeals to the intelligence which supposedly everybody has. And therefore it is universal, intellectual, logical, and it appeals to the mind.
Now at first sight--as I've to- -- as you can see now--it is for you, who enter these anabiotic places called "colleges," where 35 -- to 35 degrees of Fahrenheit, just above freezing, that instruction is all that is required, that you can get away without -- even without training, because you have no airplanes on your -- on your campus, which I really resent very much. You are condemned to instruct, and you are called "instructors." Is it possible to instruct without training and without teaching? Teaching is the appeal to this forbidden something which doesn't exist on campus, the soul, the person.
Now I think I have -- tried to explain to you why in every moment, when a world of process opened between people, there is an appeal to all the three elements in us: the person, the mind, and the body. And therefore I hold that training, instruct- -- instructing, and teaching are necessary terms, which can be just as much verified as ice, water, and steam. It's the same thing in three states of aggregate. And as you know, there is such a devastating aversion today to clear thinking that any such assumption must seem to you at first sight ridiculous. We have never heard that there are necessary elements in {this process}. You have been, so to speak, everything has boiled down to a -- to appeal to the human mind. I have never seen it possible--and this is now a dogmatic statement for which I wish to be nailed to the cross, but which I also wish that you will remember, gentlemen--no science can be taught scientifically. You cannot teach any science scientifically. You have to teach it enthusiastically, and completely, and personally. No mathematician is a teacher of mathematics if he is just a mathematician, if he just appeals to the mind of a student. He must overcome his
student with the importance of his topic, and he must show him the ropes. That is, he must make him physically able to rise to the occasion of the blackboard, which has nothing to do with the human mind, but with my elbow.
This is one of the great superstitions that clouds today the horizons of education. That to -- people really think--all these so-called scientists, who are just plumbers--no man in research can think for you--that science can be transmitted scientifically, you see. It must be science -- transmitted humanly. And you and I are people who have a body, have a mind and a personality. And these are three different things. And the appeal has to be to the whole man. And all -- the teachers of any -- in any science, whether it's zoology, or physics, or what-not, are only teachers with the -- in as far as they have this for- -- appeal to you, you see, as whole men. The rest is -- what they themselves do or know. That's something different, but has nothing to do with this translation of -- of power.
Let me tell -- perhaps illustrate a little more what instruction -- what teach- -- teaching and what training do. Let me use the simile. I must simplify matters. And similes are -- allow us to concentrate, to condense many various difficult problems into a { }.
A mother, a nurse, and a nun all take care of the sick. A modern tendency is to say that a nurse is enough. When you go to the hospital and see a young mother--your wives have their children--they fall under the pure -- under the hands of these nurses. But there are some mothers who resent this; there's something lacking -- in the maternity wards. They are just finding it out at this moment, that -- that they allow some mothers to go home very soon, because they suffer from this impersonal treatment by the nurses. The nurses have the 8hour day. And they are well-trained. They do all things right. And they beat any mother, and any nun in precision of the various movements of their body, from the bedpan to taking your temperature. The nurse is trained. The mother is untrained, usually. Could be trained, but then that's not the situation -- normal situation, when you just think of a mother per se, without any education, without any -- { }.
The mother is untrained, and therefore she is at a loss, because certain things have -- to be done around a sick person, a child. But she's unbeatable, because she's so specific and so personal. And many an occasion has been saved by this personal accompaniment of every movement of his own suffering, by the sympathy of the -- of the person who loves him, and takes care of him. You may know people -- there are many stories in literature that try to make this point that life can be saved simply by this immersion of another person into your own dreams in the -- your fever.
So the mother has something which a nurse doesn't have. The nurse has something which the mother doesn't have. The -- the nun who has taken a vow to be available for any person who comes under her care, you see, may be untrained. And many secular -- med- -- people in medicine will tell you, "Oh, we don't need these nuns. They are not trained as highly as we can -- as these nurses; they know more science." All right. Let's admit this. And the nurse is -- available to anybody. But she has not these personal ties of a mother to her own child. She hasn't the radical, manual training perhaps the nurse has today. She has, as you have as instructors, a devotion to duty, which I, without offending any personal case of nursing, have found to be missing in many a nurse, because she just has this as a paying proposition and {it means always to hold it} off.
Now why these -- are these dissimilar: mother, nun, and nurse? Because I want to stress the point that they are all three necessary. They fertilize each other's minds, and each other's actions. You cannot have just motherly care; you cannot just have nursing, and you cannot have just have religion. Any one of the three is deficient in the qualities the two other offer.
And there is a dynamic process. After the last 50 years of specify- -- of specializing in nursing, any mother in America--I'm quite sure, or at least 80 percent--know more about nursing than they knew 50 years ago, because many of the routines developed by the nurses now have infiltrated, you see, into every private home. Obviously any mother's now {deal} a new child how to nurse. So without the rationalization, without the specialization of the expert nurse, and her high -- rate of training, the mothers go still -- may too { }, so there is a constant circuit. There are then dynamics, gentlemen. Between training, instruction, and teaching, there is a constant process of interplay. Every one of these ways sharpens the process, and drives it to a higher perfection. But woe to the nun, and woe to the nurse who is not willing to admit that in certain cases a mother does wonders, the very wonders the nurse cannot work--unless she ceases to be a nurse and acts like a mother, which she may well do. But that -- that for this you would have to break the 8-hour working day.
Now this is done, gentlemen, the -- I hope the contribution of this -- of this interpolation of the simile of mother, nurse, and nun. And I mean it. It's the -- meant very severely and very strictly. Teaching, instructing, and -- and training supplement each other not only, but by concentrating on any one of these activities, the two others gain something which by themselves they wouldn't have. I, as a teacher--and I am perhaps an extreme case of a teacher, because I have no automobile to show, or no -- no aircraft, and I'm -- have no muscle to train; I have only to appeal to you as persons. I'm not an instructor at this moment, as you well -- may think, and I'm not a trainer. I'm just a teacher. I am in the most frail position. Just like a mother. I cannot appeal to you as a professional. I'm just
saying here on one reason -- ground: life must be saved, the same that the mother has to hold, because you are committed to my care. I have this one hour, and it's so wonderful, I must try it out or { }. But that's all I have. I have no other arguments; my Ph.D. is no good at this moment.
Teaching is very frail. Mothers are frail in this respect. They -- the {woman} commands a respect in their specific situation with their own children. They cannot go out, and because they are the mother to this child, take care of all the mothers' -- child -- children in the world. This is no -- no degree, no license acquired in general, impersonally, you see, and for all, {only}. So in the same sense, a teacher takes a { } make appeal to the person has to do -- to -- very few tools, very few instruments. The trainer has all the instruments he wants. { }. Everything put at his disposition, even the time of the students when they should do other work.
So -- this is clear then, that there are certain barriers, that the teacher, like the mother in the tradition of the last 50 years, has fallen, so to speak, away from public attention. We have concentrated on training -- methods, on specific methods, or we have made appeals to the {special} mind of the student. And we have finally convinced ourselves that any field, any subject matter can be taught in the same mood as the subject matter itself is treated: objectively, scientifically, rationally. And I here now come and say, "This is important, and nobody has ever learned with interest and fervor from any person who has tried just to be dust." There's no contact then between student and instructor.
So now, what has helped us to recover the -- or re- -- restate the right proportion between teaching, instruction, and training, for your own {perusal}, in your everyday situation, as instructors in a college? I think it is this fact that here I am, appealing to teachers. To teach teachers, gentlemen, is a great privilege. It is not only the handicap of which I spoke before. I said before that to teach teachers means to speak too late. Mentally, you are all already filled with preconceptions. You know what to do, and why should I -- you wait for me to tell you? But psychologically, as persons, gentlemen, you share with me a responsibility, which a student in a classroom -- who usually doesn't have, you see, you know that you have to { }, to teach one thing this year, and the -- some other thing, for example, next year, because in the meantime the rules have been changed. The content of your teaching is not safe. Now why can you demand the confidence of your students, that they should listen to you today, although you may be quite aware of the fact that next year you may have to teach something different in your instruction, { } no longer true? Only because you are truthful. Because you are a person who can change his mind.
The soul, gentlemen, is that which remains in any teacher when he
changes his mind. And I hope that many of you change their minds, without changing their personality { }. You see, the necessity of speaking of personality or soul, which has been rejected by all people who base their thinking on classroom situation, on the abstract situation at their desk, and you do not wish to draw on the necessary situations of an earthquake, a fire, a war, a revolution, a marriage pro- -- proposal, a great emergency, a death which they have to survive. All these cowards of the mind do not wish to admit that the mind is fickle, and that therefore I cannot base my existence on my mind. I have to change my mind. And very often. I hope you do, too.
Since I have to change my mind, I must appeal to myself as John Smith--or whatever my own name is in my own inner self--as a man who can change his mind. Well, who is this man who can change his mind? A man who doesn't depend on the pure truth -- poor truth so far revealed to him, who can go on to a better place. Now this road from one place to another, you see, is only straddled and walked through by what we call the "person"--or what we call intimately in our -- inner selves, the "soul"--meeting the spirit, being demanded to change your mind. Your -- our pride -- mental pride forbids it. We say we know what we -- and we hold to it, you see, our principles. But any one of you--you are fortunately mature people--knows very well that in the -- in the 30 years of your lives, in the { } of your { }, you have to change your mind {or it was} false pride, which made you very unhappy, because you wouldn't say to yourself, "I made a fool of myself."
Now anybody who can say to himself he has made a fool of himself jeopardizes -- jettisons his mentality, and says, "This mentality wasn't good enough; { } have a better one."
Therefore gentlemen, I can talk to you better than you can talk to your students about the real situation in teaching, because I can appeal to your -- the fact that you, as teachers, know that you cannot base your trustworthiness and your efficiency on your -- merely on your mind, on your mentality. Because you have to keep going, nobody has to change his mind more often really than a teacher, because that's { } you and me. We know that -- we know only those things which we can teach. No student really knows anything, despite examinations.
Since the truth, as you well -- must have experienced yourself in your teaching, comes to full life, to full meaning only that we have to teach others. Isn't that true? I think the only man in the classroom who really knows, understands, is always the teacher. By teaching, I come to seize my own knowledge, so to speak, for the first time, really fully. {Really}, I would like to here {at this} -- admit it.
So the -- the student is just the beginning teacher. In as far as we enable him to transmit what we tell him, you see, as he is -- a potential teacher himself, he begins to understand.
If I now may begin to -- from the personality in -- into -- perhaps begin to admit that teaching, instructing, and training are three aspects of the same process. You appeal to the person, the student as a potential teacher, who will trust you because you show him how to change his mind with honor, how to change your -- his mentality, you see, without false pride. Then his experience of being taught is more lasting and important than his experience of what he's instructed in, because by teaching him, you teach him two things, you see. That now he is ignorant, and now he's received something. And also he receives a certain something, you see, but that is only what at this moment enters his mind. He must also get ready to learn something else at some other time. And this point was what I tried to sum up in this rather strange {form} here: that you teach the better, the more you teach the student as a potential teacher. Because if he is on the road to teaching himself, you see, if what he takes is accepted by him not as something to be answered in an examination, spat out, so to speak, you see, on a -- on a -- in a theme to be graded A, B, C, or E, but if he, from the very beginning, admits that what is instructed him, what is trained into his body, he should be able to transmit to later generations, then you have the man, the real man. Why? You have the person in this man. You have the man who has a long-range, you see, attitude in your classroom. This man won't go to sleep. This man -- selfinterest doesn't keep people awake, you see. It's very interesting. But the responsibility does. And if you can awake in this man the feeling that the great sacrifice Uncle Sam makes in allowing him to become an Air Force officer candidate, you see, that this entails that he enters a chain of command, the chain of inspiration, the chain of division that he's a potential teacher, he must keep awake, just as any man on guard must, you see, because there is somebody coming at 10 o'clock to take over. He must find him there.
You have forgotten completely, gentlemen, by excluding the whole problems of real teaching and personality, while dismissing them as {inspirational}, sentimental pep-talk, as unnecessary, that these are very complex attitudes in every one of us, very direct -- you can test it in any classroom: if you can convince this man that one day he has to teach somebody else, you have his attention. You see, because that's dangerous, because he will make himself ridiculous. And nobody tries -- thinks that he should be laughed out of court.
So if you -- can see in your student the potential teacher, and if he can feel this, you move a plane in which the most situation between you and me at this moment, gentlemen, can be envisaged for one moment without speaking of instruction and training. And I will -- would like to use rest of my time to defining
a little more the relations between the -- the { }, the { } who teaches to potential teachers. On this level, gentlemen, it isn't that I am the first student, but that every student is the last teacher. We have flattered and cajoled our students by always telling them that we were subservient to their needs and interests, and that we would cater to -- sell them ideas. I think this is deeply shocking, gentlemen. And if you, as the military, {part of} this nation, fall in with this terrible idea that teaching is advertising, and selling, { }, the American nation can be written off from the surface of the globe. You are the only group of this nation to take life for what it is. Life is the transmission of acquired qualities in the human race, and teaching is a way of doing this. All these people in biology and genetics try to explain what it is. They don't know. We know. We teach. We transmit acquired qualities of the human race.
You know it's a great thing now between the Bolsheviks and the western gen- -- geneticists whether acquired qualities can be transmitted. Well, they -- they just don't know that they are transmitted. They are transmitted {right here}.
We have an eternal job, gentlemen, if we do not confuse it with selling ideas. Any father is a father only if he tells his boy what it's all about. You are not a father because you sleep with a woman. You are only a father when you give this boy -- boy your own name. And the -- son can say, "This is my father." Every great truth, every thing you instruct in is only truth when the man -- you give the man a security that there has been one man who told -- told him so and demands to be quoted on this truth and to be pinned down for this.
You can divide the world today into the people who say, "This is true, but don't quote me," and the people who say, "This is true, and you can quote me." There the line is drawn between teaching and {processing}. And {these young persons}, because they want to become potential teachers, I think--and we must treat them as such--want to be able to quote you for what you have said in seriousness, and in earnest, on principles of service, of obedience, of discipline, or whatever it is, on truthfulness, on self-criticism, all -- of all scientific, I mean, precision, accuracy. All these things are part of the eternal truth that has to be propagated from generation to generation, just as a physical germ has to. Teaching is simply the spiritual side of propa- -- propagation of the race; it's nothing else.
And therefore I come back to my initial story. I think I was right against my brother-in-law. You see, a father is the normal teacher of a son. And you and I are only supplementing -- the fact that this father today is a civilian, and doesn't know how to fly, and doesn't know anything, you see, ideally speaking, he should be able to teach his son.
And now comes my conclusion, gentlemen--the first conclusion in this first part--a -- the -- a teacher is always second-best. If you can find a person--a fatherly officer, for example, who is a friend of this one other officer, an older general who takes an interest in his lieutenant { } he's a better teacher of course, than we can hope to be. It is a greater honor for the teaching profession, or the instructors, to admit that we are second-rate in a great task, in the most tremendous task, you see, humanity has, which is not physical, gentlemen, propagation, but the transmission of acquired qualities of the mind and of the person, of the character. That we are second-best. Because we teach too many, you see, you cannot -- as a father, I had the privilege of calling this son my own. And we don't own our students. It is an exception that we can connect, link up with one of them in such a way, you see, that there is a unique situation, and a lasting one.
But as soon as we admit that we are vicars -- vicars of the spirit, I think we are perfectly free again to speak of the inspiration and the spirit without any bashfulness. Since we are not the pope, you see, in the classroom, and we are not the saints, and we are not prophets, but we are only taking the place of this unique situation between any one father and any one son, we have a humility, so to speak, and detachment from our own job which allows us to face the real facts, and to do a good job because we know that as vicars we must do our best to fill up this gap, you see, of the -- which otherwise is there that we are so impersonal, and so general, you see, and so removed from this {deepest} mental history that we come too late.
The admission of this barrier to teaching, that we face as teachers, that we are just vicars of the fatherhood for which every son prays {as an} experience, I think will enable us to readmit these processes which all modern textbooks on education here, so to speak, have abolished like hellfire, because they thought that was not good taste. When I speak to you from -- 10:45 to 11:45--and if you will forgive me { } 11:47--it's still seven minutes to go--what do we do as teachers, and as potential teachers, as I would like to make you think about this -- your students? You do not stoop down to these students. You do not condescend to them. You don't try--and an officer can't try--to be one of the boys. This idea of guidance and of the -- comes all from the -- from the idea that nurses and -- and couns- -- youth camp counselors are the ideal which every mother and father in this country should follow. Mothers and fathers { } today, because the office of fatherhood and motherhood seems too stifling and { }. I think you deprive your student, the potential teacher, of a great experience if you decline that you have to teach him. You cannot stoop down to him and say, "I'm just learning." You can only make him teach with you. So you must lift him up into a situation, gentlemen, in which he hasn't belonged. You have -- to lift him up into the history of the human race.
If I may put it in -- {oh, but} you're young! Here's your potential teacher. In his own life, he will be limited by this year, any time, I mean, given, 1980, when he's going to die. Oh, that's too early nowadays. Insurance companies say it's 2050. Here we are in 1952. You have your experiences -- well, from the beginning of the Air Force, from Orville Wright, or from 1908, you represent this past, and mo- -- ma- -- many more { }. { } the Army goes back much further. So you stand in this classroom, gentlemen, here and I stand here, and try to embody the experience of the race. Far before you ever came in contact with it and had any reason to think about it. I must bring this to life, and it must come through me to you.
And therefore, gentlemen, a teacher represents more times than his own time span, or he's no teacher, or he's just a {fact-book}, a sectarian. I must speak to you out of the whole stream of experience. My only responsibility is to sift, to -- to select what you need most. That there must be -- you must be shown that no truth is omitted which ever has been, you see, become known. And your student feels this very much if you have this -- this character, this dignity in your person, that you do not think it's just a manual and a textbook, but the manual is only condensing experience of the race, you see, that goes back to Rome and Greece. Even the emperors can learn something.
I read on the way here -- { } down here in a book on Roman warfare, how to make camp. I was amazed how much a -- one could learn for building an airport from the way the Romans built the camp. {It's really quite astonishing}. They also had the great care that the airport -- camp had to be kept out of the -- of attack, to be protected, that the work inside could geh- -- on like a good workshop, or a good factory, you see. So the combination of a war-like situation, you see, in enemy territory even, you see, and smooth-running inside was a great concern of -- of Roman { }. You wouldn't believe that any airman could learn anything -- from the times before aircraft was invented. But { }.
Now your student, gentlemen, is a potential teacher, and the truth must be known in 2000 and in {2050}. And you consider him as potential teacher, just as a father --. When is a father a good father? When he treats his son as a potential father. What is {sonhood} against slavery, servant, you see, obed- -- blind obedience? Well, any general who treats his lieutenant as a human being doesn't treat him as a human being, but as a potential general. That's why the lieutenant isn't kicked around.
It's so simple that I always wonder why it isn't mentioned, you see. As long as you think of your instructing as just giving this man rules or something this moment, you do not treat him as a {free creature}. You treat just as a man still going. As soon as you develop in him the sense that he is taught because
somebody has to teach always, you see, you raise him to your own level of equality. And this is democracy, gentlemen, not the condescension, you see, to the student in him, but a lifting him up to the rank as a future teacher. You see the difference in attitude perhaps? Between { } instructing somebody who has to know right away in an examination, and this appeal to the best powers in a man just as a father tells his son all those things which the son will need one day when he has to found a family.
Now gentlemen, in this sense then in every classroom, something rather miraculous happens. Man acts as a time-binder. You come in, your students come in, supposedly open-minded, supposedly able to listen. The assumption however is that they are listening not for themselves, but for the whole time in which I will be dead, and have disappeared, and everything I know or have experienced is buried. You may be younger than your students. Potentially a teacher is always old; a student is always young. Your student may be 70, but for the purpose of learning, he is the younger, and you represent the old stream of tradition, you see; he may enter this as the next { }. You can see this.
Therefore, gentlemen, old or young in teaching are not physical, have no physical meaning, no biological meaning. This is not -- we are not dealing with zoological specimens in teaching. But we create epochs. Between a teaching generation and a learning generation, there is epoch -- this is an epoch-making event, because one generation represents the ideas of the old, and tries to energize the younger men so that they can carry on, by word, by personality, so that there can be teaching again, and always, and forever.
Now if this happens, you see, my high faith in your being willing to take up the torch, and your hopes that you will take something away out of the classroom, are -- bind together. A teacher lives by faith. And young people, the younger ones live by hope. And there is one common virtue between the thr- -- the -- the -- the two, which I don't have to mention. It's a { } {word}, but it's a great power of the third, super-human virtue. You know the list; which one chains hope, and faith, and something third.
If you produce the activation, the actualization of these three virtues in your class--and you can, you see--you get -- give the man the -- the education to which he is entitled, because you lift him up for the first time, this little recruit, this little freshman, this little sophomore, to the year 1952. When I say to a man, "He's a potential teacher," when a father says to his son, "You are my son," I put him for the first time into the his- -- on the historical scene of this year. Before, he is just on a playground; he's out of time.
An education, gentlemen, means to place a man between the former and
the next generation. There has been so much fuss about education that I thought I should end up my analysis of teaching, instruction, and training by summing up what all these three things together do: they educate a man. But to educate is not to hold a man, is not to put a man in a procrustean bed, you see, to pull his nose, or to kick him in the pants, to -- to change him. But it is to lift him up in the position as a potential teacher, as a son, between you and the next generation of people to be instructed here, you see. You have educated a man when he takes his place in the stream of time at his proper moment. And -- I -- I assure you, I have instructed -- instructed recruits in the most -- boring way, I have always found it interesting in the feeling that I can help to place these people into their righteous time. We are not contemporaries if we are not educated. And you as -- as instructors on our campuses can heal the wounds which have been {slaying} to the education and academic body, to the whole -- our youth of America, by allowing them to remain playboys, by never lifting them up in a -- a truly educational process into the situation of potential fathers or potential teachers.
Thank you.