THIS ESSAY IS NOT ABOUT TEACHING ANY specific subject. It is about teaching itself. If some imaginary dean were to ask me why I should be paid to teach political theory, I would naturally offer him only the most conventional reasons for pursuing my vocation. First of all I would remind him that one of the main purposes of a liberal education is to integrate the young into the literary culture of our society. And no one would argue that the history of political theory is marginal to our intellectual heritage, to our collective self-understanding, or to a sense of the continuing presence of the past. Just about every university course that contributes to the general education of our students, whether it deals with literature, the fine arts or the human sciences, invariably has a political theory component—often, it must be said, rather crudely handled. The subject simply insinuates itself into every intellectual corner. Clearly there is a real need to have it taught properly, since it must be a part of an educated person’s repertory. Among the ways of learning how to think coherently and critically about politics, none is better than the study of the great authors from Thucydides to the present. Self-education will, in this case, fail. The autodidact always misses the obvious and the insulated analyst of concepts is always in danger of re-inventing a primitive version of the wheel. He may also become the prisoner of a single vocabulary, which would be a disaster, given that our accumulated political notions constitute a veritable Tower of Babel. The only way to avoid banality is to encounter, in an intense way, the intellectually wholly other, and to discover how superior to the present and the familiar the utterly remote can be. What could be more challenging than Plato? On the practical side, I would then point out to the now subdued dean that reading books is not enough, and that there must be a personal exchange for deep learning to actually take place. A teacher must be visibly there to move the students in the first place and then prove to them that a sane and intelligent adult can really care deeply about such things as the history of political thought. It is an Emersonian act of representation, in which the teacher gets the young to recognize and become part of a wide intellectual world, but also accepts that the questions and demands of individual students require respectful answers, and even occasionally a rethinking of received wisdom, especially one’s own. Such, then, would be the perfectly sound and not unconvincing talk I would give in my official capacity. I would walk away perhaps richer, but also quite ashamed of myself. For while I would not have lied I would not have been entirely truthful either. I would not have told the dean what it may not be his business to know, why I really teach political theory, or, indeed, why anyone teaches any canon of great literature.
The only reason for teaching political theory is that one is utterly, and possibly irrationally convinced that it is enormously important—and one loves it. It is not for the sake of the students and not even for one’s own, apart from one’s intellectual obsession, that one can, year after year, think and think about, and explain and explain the contents of books written unimaginably long ago. It is a complex response to a primary passion. Something has set it off, possibly an ideology to which one is committed or its collapse, or historical experience, such as the Second World War lived in Europe or the Depression in America, or the felt need to find new political expressions for an altered and only half understood political world. In any case there must be some personally experienced public events to create an enduring interest in asking the vital question, “how can one think about this at all?” If that becomes an unshakable preoccupation and a passionate quest, then one will teach political theory. In different, but related ways I believe this to be true of all literary studies.
There are easier and betters ways of making a living than teaching, and prestige and fame are not among its rewards. It does not recommend itself as a way of getting on in the world. One may enjoy the company of young people, and good teachers usually do, but the relations between students and teachers are highly stylized and brief. To enter upon an academic career because one thinks that it offers an attractive, genteel, and untroubled “life style” is to head for Waterloo. Unless one is emotionally absorbed in one’s subject, teaching is dull, and the normal irritations of academic life may become intolerable. To look forward to a career of being a general all-purpose mentor to the young, or worse, an eternal undergraduate, is to court self-contempt, intellectual decay, and the condescending pity of one’s younger colleagues. Even the young become tiresome as the difference in age grows greater. One loses the sense of their individuality and begins to treat them as instances of the same category of being. Such impersonality may bother the student, but it may be less damaging than the too personal manner of teaching in which the bull-session and manipulation replace teaching. In short, unless the impulse to teach is generated by the love of the subject, political theory in this case, it must fail for both the teacher and the student. Nothing else can make the flow of students through the classroom, the seminar, and one’s study worthwhile. For the teacher there has to be an enduring intellectual incentive, for the student, something more genuine than mild entertainment. To teach this literature as if it were a precious gift that one gives to every new generation of students, one must really want to read it over and over oneself, because each reading reveals new possibilities, new perceptions, and new ideas. If there is nothing exciting in those books for the teacher, there won’t be anything interesting in them for the students either. And if the teacher creates unresponsive students, she cannot expect to get the one thing they can contribute to our mutual encounters: questions and challenges. Nor will the teacher have the occasional pleasure of seeing an immature mind become absolutely accomplished.
The only reason to teach political theory is the conviction that a complete person must be able to think intelligently about government, and that the only way to rise above banality is to learn to think one’s way through the works of the great writers on the subject and to learn to argue with them. To see how political ideas fit into the republic of letters generally, into the political systems within which they took place, and finally to see what is dead and alive within this accumulated wealth of psychological and social speculation is to be intellectually transformed, and to have something completely and immediately relevant to think about at any time of the day. If I did not believe that, I would quit teaching at once and go into business.
Someone might suggest that writing offers a better way to tell the world about political theory and especially to contribute something directly to it. This is not the trivial and commonplace notion that, given the limits of time, one should do one’s “own work,” or “research,” rather than teach. Teaching students is as much one’s own work as anything can be, and research is something that natural scientists do. Very little if anything that a political theorist does can be described as an addition to factual knowledge about the world, as experimentation or as discovery. It is therefore pretentious and silly for us to talk about a conflict between the demands of research and teaching. If there is a choice to be made at all, it is between two modes of teaching. And while it is true that life is short, I do not see why there should be a particularly great difficulty in dividing one’s time between two kinds of teaching and any of the other things one might want to do. Time is not, I suspect, the real issue at all. It is merely a way of talking about the fact that some teachers cannot and do not write anything at all, or nothing worth reading. In fact, there are two ways of teaching, directly and indirectly, and both are psychologically necessary for a full scholarly life because they make different demands upon the teacher. To address an indeterminate and anonymous audience of readers is very different from talking to visible students. It is not a conversation. One cannot take back in two minutes what one has already said, so the level of clarity has to be higher and there is no room for spontaneity. One means to say something that has not been said before and present it in a way suited to one’s peers. Still one is teaching political theory, because in one way or another, one writes to instruct one’s readers. The greatest difference in writing rather than talking is that one can concentrate entirely on getting it right. In that respect it is more like teaching graduate students, who, one hopes, will be the political theorists of the future. Because they are colleagues-in-the-making, they force the teacher to acts of self-clarification and self-education at the highest level. That is what happens when one writes about any aspect of political theory as well, whether it be placing texts in historical context, a conceptual analysis, an explication of a text, or an argument about a set of ancient issues in the light of current experience. Not to do this at all is to doom oneself to intellectual stagnation and a sort of aged infancy, which cannot but damage one’s performance as a direct teacher. And staleness, of course, sets an awful example to graduate students. The issue thus cannot be whether to teach or to write, but how to engage in two ways of teaching simultaneously or alternatively.
Some teachers can successfully write up and publish their lectures. Some of my most distinguished colleagues have written some of the best books this way. They think them through on their feet and then transform them into readable prose. For them the distinction between direct and indirect teaching hardly exists, and they often are the most accomplished and interesting lecturers. If they do anything indifferently it is the seminar and tutorial, simply because their strength is public presentation, in speech as well as in print. I, however, like many other scholars, must keep the two kinds of teaching completely apart. If I do not, my lectures become well-turned little essays and are hard to follow. Moreover, my better lectures, which do serve the needs of undergraduates, no longer seem to me fit for publication after I have given them. Writing up my lectures would strike me as simply warming up an uninteresting soup. What I like doing most, and probably do best, is small-group instruction. I enjoy teaching seminars for both undergraduate and graduate students. Ten to twenty people around a table, week after week, soon work together in an easy way, and though there should be a tense and even competitive spirit afoot, a lot can be achieved in discussing a single text in a group. Political theory lends itself particularly well to such teaching because it is naturally and inherently controversial. The best texts, however, do provide a core of inner unity, so the discussions do not fly all over the place. I find such instruction difficult but very rewarding when it goes well, though painful when it does not work out. In some mysterious way I also get ideas for articles and books out of these sessions.
Even devoted teachers have long periods of doldrums. What to do? Because political theory as a subject is always in motion, given its responsiveness to events, one cannot remain idle. Getting on with something new is important even before routine has made teaching a chore. Even going to a good conference a couple of times a year should be seen as a way of recharging the batteries. Is book reviewing a total waste of time? Not if one picks the books carefully. It is as good a way as any to keep up with the field. To escape from tedium one might avoid teaching the same courses too often or repeat them only every second year. Students can always be told in advance and can plan accordingly. They will be the beneficiaries of revised notes, rethinking, and an altogether livelier teacher. Teaching in a university quite unlike one’s own can also be very invigorating. Absence notoriously inspires fondness. In any case something must be done. The worst thing that can happen to a teacher is just to rot away.
The importance of remaining actively engaged with political theory, by writing about it oneself and reading what others write, is particularly great when teaching graduate students. Talking to them about one’s own writing is the best way of showing them how an article or a book is actually put together. Moreover, they help with their aggressive critical attitudes and with the generational differences they bring to bear on any discussion. Nothing is better for teaching the really good graduate students than making them realize that their ideas matter and that soon they will be ready to teach and write independently. What neither they nor the undergraduates need is to consume information served to them by a passive teacher who is neither actively contributing to the literature of political theory nor interested in new work of any kind. Whatever teaching political theory may be, it cannot merely amount to the relaying of some body of accepted wisdom which requires nothing but transmission from teacher to student. An element of inconclusive struggling between young and old is a very necessary part of the process of graduate education especially, and it cannot occur unless the teacher is also creative as an author, with all that implies psychologically and intellectually. The awful alternative to teaching as enjoyment with others is the repetition of the same wretched anecdotes and the same stale doctrines year after year by a teacher who cannot offer a graduate student a genuine picture of what real thinking is like. That is the certain fate of the political theorist who never writes at all or even fails to write about a fair variety of topics.
Teaching political theory, like any profession, has its built-in hazards, and there is no point in pretending that they do not exist. Tedium, indifference, and stagnation are the typical afflictions of older teachers. They will not be fatal if the instructor really feels an unabated passion for political thinking, for she can easily protect herself against the onset of a passing ill humor. If, however, she has really ceased to care about the subject, then there is no chance of recovery.
Indifference is not the only way to fail to teach honestly. The other extreme is also tempting and fatal in its own way. There is always a big demand for the guru-teacher at any university. Many young people seek leaders, superior parents, inspiration, and above all the feelings of whole-hearted discipleship. Most of us, either for lack of talent or by following plain good sense, find it easy to resist this call to serve as a prophet, but not all do. Political theory, being so close to ideology, particularly attracts students looking for a guru-teacher, and teachers who have both strong personal convictions and better than average rhetorical powers may find the prospect of a devoted following irresistible. The “masters” are not doing those students a favor because they end up retarding their maturation and closing their minds to the rich variety of alternative views. That they are betraying the scholarly vocation might also be a consideration, but most of all the gurus have ceased to care for political theory; they are basically interested in themselves, in their message, in their followers, and in their renown.
If there are many ways of being a bad teacher and also of losing interest in teaching, there are also many gratifications. Every student is a new challenge and it is a delight to see the young catch on to the difficult texts and ideas, especially if they began as virtual tabulae rasae. And while a bad seminar session is pure hell a good one is surely a treat. Among the pleasures of teaching graduate students is that one does not lose touch with the best ones. They soon become one’s colleagues and friends, the ups and downs of apprenticeship and late adolescence long since mercifully forgotten. It is the experience of renewal, of keeping political theory alive, and changing. The same thing does not occur in one’s relations with undergraduates, and that is undeniably one of the more unfortunate facts about teaching. One never can really know what impact, if any, one has had on the young people who take notes in one’s lectures, come to tutorials regularly and talk to one during office hours. They are usually very bright. That does not alter the likelihood that in a few years they will neither remember nor care about what I or anyone else taught them. Our effect upon their development may be profound, because we see them during a very intense and significant period in their lives, but it is an unknowable and forgotten little piece of their life’s experiences even while at college, not to mention in “the real world.” Our specific contribution is fleeting and forgettable. Two years out of college your students will remember you, but not what you said or got them to read, even if you impressed them in some enduring way. The negligible and indirect bearing one’s work has on students cannot but give one a sense of futility at times. The best way to cope with such feelings is to concentrate on the learning that does go on visibly, even if its future functions must remain obscure. I place my bet on the students’ being altered for the better, though in unknowable ways, by my teaching. And who would not say that knowledge, however digested, is not better than ignorance? And ignorant is what the young would be and remain if we did not teach them. Basically it depends upon us whether the entire college career of a young woman or man is significant and improving or not. Do we actually have a right to act on any other assumptions?
Some of the afflictions that threaten teachers are not entirely within our control, but there is one that is wholly self-inflicted and also contemptible. That is what I call the new snobbery. The old snobbery was bad enough. It tended to be the special preserve of humanists, political theorists among them. Its chief components were racism, antisemitism, and a fawning preference for the sons of the rich and famous. Deeply unintellectual, it was sometimes perfectly compatible with the more traditional forms of scholarship and fine teaching for the happy few. It did little to prepare anyone for the actual world and it was morally repulsive, with implications that eventually became quite clear. There is little left of that, because in time it became strangling and threatened the intellectual prospects of any university and the advance of the human as well as physical sciences. It has now been replaced by a different virus. It tells the world that clever young women and men should not become unglamorous schoolteachers, but should use the university as a platform from which to impress the world of affairs, to affect the public at large, and to find wealth and fame through the certificates of expertise that a university appointment yields. They will, so to speak, be instructing the entire nation by their advice. Write for conspicuous publications, meet, consult, attend, make money, and get your name into the newspapers, they tell us. The young will certainly yearn to be seen with them, will complain of their all too frequent absences, and if they ever do get to hear a lecture by the celebrity-professor they will get nothing, and not even realize that they have been cheated. Teaching is openly looked down upon and despised in a manner not unlike the disdain that the hereditary nobility of Europe used to feel for manual labor and trade. Except, of course, that the new snob is supposed to be a teacher and has simply sold himself, very successfully, it must be said, as something else and better to a gullible public.
The consequences of the new snobbery for the life of the university are fairly serious. It embitters the relations between the old and the young, the tenured and the untenured, in a wholly destructive way. In an institution where there are many justifiable and functional differences of prestige and rank, according to distinction, accomplishment, and age, it is particularly unnecessary and damaging to add useless and destructive ones. The untenured faculty is forced not only to do all the teaching, but they must hear their seniors openly refuse to teach and make derisory remarks about the poor mediocrities and the junior faculty who do it all. And with the association of ideas being what it is, teaching, when it is identified entirely with the young and untenured, is regarded with a diffuse contempt. Its source is surely the uneasy hostility that many an aging male feels and displays for the young, whom at another level he may well fear as successors. That is in itself a recipe for ill feeling. To add to it, when promotion time comes around, teaching is suddenly taken into account, but because the university authorities still require some proof of teaching skill, not because it is universally valued.
Adding to the demoralization of the young teacher is the pathetic effort of his seniors to look like natural scientists without actually doing analogous or similar work, and a general attitude of looking down at the merely local scene. This is the self-hating fantasy of many humanists and social scientists, and it does no one any good at all. There is no proof, moreover, that in spite of much pompous talk about research projects, grants, and the like these people actually produce better work or even publish more than those who quietly teach in classes and in writing. Like the old snobbery, the new variety expresses a very deep loss of self-esteem. And that brings us back to the beginning: to teach without loving one’s subject at all, or caring for it a lot less than for other gratifications, whether material or intangible, is neither easy nor satisfying. Moreover, those who are neither scholars nor teachers now present a real menace to any university and to education generally. That is why the response of those who really understand what teaching is all about must simply be real self-respect grounded in the knowledge that they alone constitute the real world of learning now.
This text was first published as pages 151–160 in Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now, edited by James Engell and David Perkins, Harvard English Studies 18, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The text did not form part of the lectures published in this volume but appeared a few years earlier; it nevertheless gives us an insight into how Shklar conceived of scholarly activities such as teaching and writing and how they relate to each other. For an evaluation of her argument in the context of the lectures published here see the Editors’ Introduction.