The Great Gadflies

What makes a great teacher great? Last week one of education's timeless questions got a partial answer: a great teacher makes his students stretch.

Houston Peterson, head of Manhattan's Cooper Union forum and onetime Rutgers philosophy professor, served up this judgment in a unique anthology: Great Teachers, Portrayed by Those Who Studied under Them (Rutgers University Press, $3.50). Its 22 essays ranged from a profile of Anne Mansfield Sullivan by her only pupil, Helen Keller, to impressions of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Russell Lowell.

Emerson, Anne Sullivan and the good and great teachers in between were all masters of the mental stretch. Near the top was James Mill, whose son and pupil, John Stuart Mill, tells how he began learning Greek at three and Latin at eight. Observes J.S.: "A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can."

Blind, deaf Helen Keller had to stretch just as hard, merely to start living. At seven, more than five years after illness destroyed her vision and hearing, she felt a doll being thrust into her hands by a new friend. Writes Helen: "When I had played with [the doll] a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word 'd-o-l-l.' I was at once interested in this finger play. . . . I did not know [for several weeks] that I was spelling a word or even that words existed."

Anne Sullivan, obviously, possessed the good teacher's infinite patience, tolerance of repeated failure, and contagious enthusiasm. Woodrow Wilson, described as Princeton's "matinee-idol" professor of politics, had only the enthusiasm. Though he is included as a "great teacher," the former student who describes him writes that pupils were inspired by Wilson's intellect but repelled by his intellectuality. Because he knew all the answers, he froze most of his listeners.

But the truly great teachers, like Socratic gadflies, buzzed around their pupils' brains, telling them how to think but never what to think. A few of the best:

Frederick Jackson Turner, Wisconsin's famed historian of the western frontier (described by Historian Carl Becker): "The lecture itself, if that is the word for it, seemed never 'prepared.' [It] was just informal, intimately conversational talk, always serious without ever being solemn; enlivened with humor . . . yet never falling to the level of the sad professorial joke. . . . No, lecture isn't the word . . . no musty air of academic infallibility clouding the room, no laying down of the law and gospel according to Turner; but . . . novel ideas carelessly thrown out with more questions asked than were answered, more problems posed than solved. . ."

Charles Edward Garman, Amherst's frail 19th Century logician: "Garman taught . . . not the technique of logic, but the practical application of logical methods. . . . He was capable of making a false statement seem convincing, as a means to an end. This was extraordinarily stimulating; you never felt quite sure whether to accept what was said or not; you had to think."

Francis Barton Gummere, Haverford's English scholar (remembered by Christopher Morley): "As far as the battle of learning goes, we were pacifists--conscientious objectors. . . . It was his way to pretend that we knew far more than we did; so with perfect courtesy and gravity, he would ask our opinion on some matter of which we knew next to nothing; and we knew it was only his exquisiteness of good manners that impelled the habit. . . . To fail him in some task [became] the one thing most abhorrent in dealing with such a man--a discourtesy."

Mark Hopkins, Williams' philosopher-president: "[His enthusiasm] continued for three score years with no abatement. . . . He was then 85 years old, but his [passion for rediscovery remained] as keen in questions which he had discussed with six generations of students. . . 'I missed only one day last year,' he said . . . 'and then the young men sent a committee asking me not to venture out, since the great storm that was raging made the streets nearly impassable.'"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the barnstorming lecturer to the U.S., as Lowell remembered him: "There is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist. . . . Behind each word we divine the force of a noble character, the weight of a large capital of thinking and being. We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson. . . . If asked what was left? what we carried home? . . . we might have asked in return what one brought away from a symphony of Beethoven?"

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