Teaching versus Preaching
by Tibor R. Machan
After having taught college for nearly forty years, I can report that a great many teachers use their class rooms to preach, not to teach. (The same is reportedly the case in secondary schooling but I am not qualified to speak to that.)
In the tradition of liberal education, which is what is supposed to guide the profession of teaching, when professors enter the classroom, they are supposed to present to their students facts about the subject matter and, where appropriate, the variety of viewpoints that have gained prominence concerning it. The former approach is mainly associated with the natural sciences, the latter with the humanities and social sciences. Of course, facts are involved in both and even where there are different viewpoints afoot, it doesn’t mean they are all equally sound. But because they have all gained respectability, the professor is not supposed to take sides. He
or she is supposed to familiarize students with these prominent perspectives and leave it to the students to decide which position is the most reasonable.
Of course, total nonpartisanship is unlikely, even if possible. And students usually do not expect it—nor do they need it since they are, after all, capable of careful thinking. But they do deserve a respectful representation of all those positions the professor may not find convincing. After all, another professor with just those views could be teaching the very same course and they all took an oath, as it were, to teach, not preach.
The frequent partisanship of professors is, of course, offset by the fact that students take quite a few courses and most are taught by different teachers, so they do often receive representation of different viewpoints even if their teachers are out and out partisan. Yet even with partisan teaching, contrary viewpoints aren’t supposed to be ridiculed—if they are worth teaching, they are worth rendering at their strongest, instead of being belittled, spoofed.
Sadly this tradition of liberal education is not being faithfully followed by many professors. I do not only have my own experience—with my own nine years of college and graduate education, with my colleagues, and with reports from students—on which to base my assessment. I also have my three children with their experiences in college. They, too, have had all too many professors who engage in blatant malpractice. They often make no attempt to represent ideas at their strongest with which they disagree and quite often outright rant and rave against these, as well as at thinkers who hold them. Back when I was a graduate student, one famous Oxford educated professor of mine dismissed all philosophers prior to Bertrand Russell as nothing but ideologues—which is to say, as apologists for some ruling class. And he gave no argument for this at all.
The abuse of class room power is nothing new but it is my impression that it used to be held in very low esteem and prevailed only because some who received tenure took advantage of the policy of academic freedom. It seems, however, that these days the abuse is the norm, although it is difficult to track the matter since the classroom tends to be the fiefdom of the professor so that no one can come in without his or her permission. And deans do not breach this practice, even though they are perhaps the only ones who have the authority to do so.
All this is disconcerting although the effort to take advantage of one’s captive audience in a classroom is not likely to get far in a relatively free society. There are many other sources of information, educated opinion, and competent renditions of different viewpoints, so even if some professors try to indoctrinate their students with just their take on a subject and denounce everyone else’s as silly, they are likely to be found out.
The one clear liability of professorial malpractice can be serious, however. This is the student’s grade who dares oppose a very partisan teacher. To such students, who do not want to become wallflowers as they face such destructive professors, ones who would penalize them for failing to tow the line, I have a suggestion. Raise your objections, your questions, in the third person—for example, "I wonder what you would say to a critic who says this or that to the idea you just championed?" Or "Are there not some who have proposed this objection to your position and how would you respond to them?" This approach could help one dodge the mean-minded grading of professors who want full compliance from their students and will punish them for refusing to provide it. But sadly even this tactic cannot stop those teachers who will refuse to hear anything contrary to their views from doing damage to their students.
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