By JEREMY DUQUESNE ADAMS,
         Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor

I used to be entranced by Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, and once wrote a deadly serious article on what I thought it teaches us about teaching (“Medievalists as Teachers: North American Models,”—with Bonnie Wheeler, in Medieval Studies in North America: Past, Present, and Future, Francis G. Gentry and Christopher Kleinhenz, eds. {Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982}, pp. 201-21, see esp. 213-21).  I still think that article makes some sense: e.g., that there are several things the teacher should not become – the progenitor of the student’s ideas, the transmitter of practical technique, certainly not the wrong kind of friend or lover (the last of these a problem not only in Plato’s day). Maybe acceptable are the roles of coach or (especially for graduate students) the trainer of apprentices acquiring technique, perhaps even the military commander, leading the student band in an assault upon the evidence or on ignorance of it. Instead, I agreed with Plato’s metaphor of the teacher as maias, the more-than-midwife that Socrates’ mother was.

At that time I was also interested in (though I wouldn’t say entranced by) the distinguished classicist William Arrowsmith’s triad of Apollinian, Dionysiac, and Titanic teachers and teaching. One current criticism of that attempt to set up pedagogic models is that it’s based not so much on authentically ancient Greek thought as on nineteenth- century German scholarly categories. I don’t see why that automatically invalidates Arrowsmith’s triple paradigm; nineteenth-century Germans did a lot of highly creative derivative thinking. It may explain, however, why I’ve come to see it as less satisfying than I did formerly.

Maybe there is something to the Renaissance cry, “Ad fontes!” (“Back to the sources!”). I’ve found little contemporary writing on pedagogy to be particularly insightful or new, and have been driven back to the sources Arrowsmith so rightly admired.  I’ve got to admit that I find myself stuck with Plato, especially with his transcendent and yet deeply penetrating triad of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. In a limited sense, one can say that Arrowsmith’s Titanic teaching is enamored of the beautiful, his Apollonian pursues the true, while his Dionysiac teacher strives to present at least the question of the good. But these two triadic paradigms aren’t really congruent; at best they overlap.  At the moment I think there’s an important place for a fourth, more modern category: the Useful. I am nowhere near succumbing to nineteenth-century English Utilitarian thought (God! that Mill can grind slow); one can admire Jeremy Bentham’s role in founding the University of London without having to roll him out stuffed and formaldehyded year after year (see end note 1).

But I’ve always thought, despite long and obedient conditioning to the ideology of mid-twentieth-century humanities professors, that we must ask why we human beings wish to learn. And so, why some of us choose to teach. And I’m increasingly convinced that many, perhaps most of our students want to learn history in order to learn from it something they find useful. (Cardinal Newman would be distressed, of course.) An illustration of the durability of that current desire was the local community’s reaction to our department’s lecture series on empires, which began in the fall of 2003 and is being revived this year on a reduced scale in the Stanton Sharp Lecture Series.  It was abundantly clear that the public loved the lectures that validated the current American fumbling with imperial roles and was disappointed by the lectures that intelligently and from the professional historians’ view properly critiqued such enthusiasm, that debunked the easy application of ‘the lessons of history’. One lesson that was hard to miss: young and old, we tend to want useful lessons from history, and we often want them to be comfortable.

We can dismiss that impulse as a specious demand for spurious relevancy, as my generation of humanistic historians was trained to react, or we can address that need directly. In the 1960s the social sciences did so, with what seemed to me commendable results – and incidentally, a great swell in student enrollments and cadre formation. So did my classmate and lifelong friend Charles T. Wood, a great medievalist whose recent death is a terrible loss to our cadre. At Dartmouth (sometimes called the SMU of the Ivy League) he confronted that cry for relevancy with a series of seminars on the ‘truth’ about Joan of Arc and Richard III that became famous not only at Dartmouth but throughout the profession, and incidentally produced half-a-dozen Apollonian-Dionysiac scholarly articles and a compelling book. My effort to do something faintly like that in the fall of 2002 with the historical and literary, ‘real’ and mythical Cid, in the format of a First-Year Seminar, has so far produced only a plenary address to the Texas Medieval Association, plus a lot else in the way of intellectual consequences that would be difficult to convey in the existing genres of reportage.

Let me conclude this essay with an experiment of the last two years in my medieval history survey course. I carefully (though rarely explicitly) restructured my Tuesday lectures in line with the Platonic categories of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as well as with a new rhetorical tactic more suitable to 80-minute under-graduate attention-spans (especially in the afternoon). On Thursdays we discuss primary texts and sometimes dialogue about slides making visual that week’s topic. I generally have too many students (50+) in that class to handle discussions properly, so the students are broken up into eight discussion circles each of which prepares its presentation of certain issues to one of three discussion sections meeting at three different times that day. One to three of the circles belonging to each section prepare in rotation their presentations (in dialogue, not lecture or report form), but each of the circles is asked to share with the rest of the section what they see in those texts that teaches us about truth, goodness, and beauty. At first my students were surprised and a bit put off by this format and its demands, but many liked the idea, and soon began to realize it, if somewhat shyly. They got comfortable with enunciating what they came to see of these great ideas in this suddenly not so remote, even surprisingly relevant historical material. Their mid-term bluebooks suggested strongly that quite a few had internalized the benefits even in the hopelessly conventional exercise of bluebook-writing.

Now I must admit that sometimes this labor-intensive technique has worked, and sometimes it hasn’t. More often than not the Thrasymachi in these sections, even the more polite Glaucons and Adeimanti (see end note 2), at their best the restive young Aristotles, have been impatient with what they see as fuzzy utopianism, and wanted the facts – or the interpretations; it’s pretty much the same to them – and I’ve yielded to their desires and my old, long-practised habits. But at least I haven’t had to drink hemlock yet. 

Notes—for those who haven’t had the good fortune to study with Professor Adams:

1. According to his wishes, Bentham’s body is dressed and on display at University College, University of London, where many of our students have studied in the SMU-in-Britain program.

2. Thrasymachus challenged Socrates rudely in Plato’s Republic, and Plato’s brothers, Glaucons and Adeimanti, politely but firmly and relentlessly kept questioning him.  Aristotle was Plato’s independent-minded student and later his institutional rival.

“…we must

ask why we

human beings

 wish to learn.

And so,

why some

of us

choose to

teach.”

“…young and old, we tend

 to want useful lessons from history,

and we often want them

to be comfortable.”

“They [students] got comfortable with enunciating what they

came to see

of these great ideas in this suddenly not so remote, even surprisingly relevant historical material.”