ABSTRACT
In her autobiography, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (1996), Jane Tompkins (1996) narrates her struggle to break the bonds holding the teacher to curriculum so that she might fulfill her desire to practice currere, though she cannot name that attempt because she proudly announces at the very beginning of her book that “I had no desire to pick up a book on teaching—in fact, I had a positive aversion to doing so— and I couldn’t even muster the energy to feel guilt about it…. It was to my own experience that I needed to turn for enlightenment” (p. xii). I think Tompkins addresses here a mythology that pervades our society and one that especially permeates the schools: that teaching can only be learned in experience and has no theoretical or philosophical support. Philosophy of education exists, but it is an intellectual tradition though hardly a practical one. In tightly structured accreditation programs for teacher licensure, classroom management often replaces philosophy of education as a required course. This is a misunderstanding so serious that I cannot begin to address it here, though this belief and practice sits at the center of too many teacher education programs. Teachers, they hold, are not intellectuals! Try to imagine the last representation of a teacher anywhere in American culture that focuses on her intelligence and critical acumen. The field is overrun by practitioners but no scholars, and the propaganda announces that teaching can be learned merely by practice and in the absence of ideas. We even hire people who have never taken an education class to practice in the classrooms where sit our children! As if there is nothing to teaching but management of the classroom for the purpose of efficiently transmitting the subject matter; as if education is subject matter. As if Tompkins’ book itself is not itself filled with ideas she would have the educator-reader accept, but which, had Tompkins read just a bit in education, she might have recognized as ideas already constituting a significant field occupied by an impressive array of scholars and practitioners. She would also have discovered a field with a long and deep history. Then, she might have considered joining the movement rather than imagining that she had discovered it. She says,
What I would like to see emerge in this country is a more holistic way of conceiving education—by which I mean a way of teaching and learning that is not just task-oriented but always looking over its shoulder at everything that is going on around. Such a method would never fail to take into account that students and teachers have bodies that are mortal, hearts that can be broken, spirits that need to be fed. It would be interested in experience as much as in book knowledge, and its responsibility would be the growth of whole human beings, in harmony with the planet and with one another. (p. xiii)
