VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 3
Learning High Enough to Teach, Conduct Upright Enough to Be a Model
The last two sections said the true place of education is in the person, and that a teacher must see the particular material of each child. This section takes up what makes a teacher able to do that deep work, through an old eight-word line about the teacher's way. Learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model. This is the close of the chapter.
The line names two things a teacher stands on. The first, learning high enough to teach. To teach a thing you have to stand higher in it than the one you teach. Know the subject, and know it well, or you have no ground to teach from. This half is plain, and it is the half people usually think of when they think of a good teacher, that he knows a great deal.
But the line does not stop there, and the second half is the deeper one. Conduct upright enough to be a model. A teacher teaches not only by what he knows but by what he is. His own person is the real textbook, and the students read it every day, whether he means them to or not. A teacher who lectures on honesty and then fudges a grade to please a parent has taught dishonesty, and taught it far more deeply than any lecture. A teacher who never once says the word respect, and treats the man who sweeps the classroom with plain courtesy, has taught respect, and taught it into the bone. The children do not learn what the teacher says. They learn what the teacher is.
This is teaching by one's own person, and it runs deeper than teaching by words. Words go in at the shallow layers, knowledge and belief, the ones the fifth chapter named. But a teacher's person goes in at the deep layers, the habit and the body's own reaction, because the children soak in it, day after day, year after year, without noticing. The teacher is a vat, and the students are dyed its color. Recall the dye vat of the seventh chapter. A classroom is a vat, and whatever the teacher truly is, warm or cold, fair or petty, is the color that soaks into every child in the room. This is why conduct upright enough to be a model weighs more than learning high enough to teach. A teacher can hand on knowledge from a lectern. He can only hand on the deep things, the values, the character, the sense of how a person treats a person, by being them, in front of the children, every day.
And that is the whole of what this chapter has been driving at. The true place of education is not in the curriculum, and not in the lesson, and not in the words. It is in the person of the teacher, in who the teacher actually is. Recall the ritual of the eleventh chapter, whose core was not the form but the heart underneath. It is the same here. The form of teaching is the lesson. The heart of teaching is the person. And the child learns the heart.
That closes the fourteenth chapter. Pull it together. A school carries five layers of work, and the curriculum covers only the top, while the deep layers are carried by the teacher as a person. Confucius taught each according to his material, and the old book on learning nurtured the strengths and remedied the failings, because only a person can see the particular child. And an old line holds that a teacher stands on two things, learning high enough to teach and conduct upright enough to be a model, of which the second is the deeper, because a teacher hands on the deep things not by words but by being them, a vat the children are dyed by. That is the fourteenth stake this chapter drives. The true place of education is not in the curriculum, it is in the person.
But handing down, it turns out, is not one operation but two. One is teaching, the deliberate thing, a teacher setting out on purpose to hand something on. The other has never had a name, and yet it is the one that goes in deepest, the children soaking in what the teacher simply is. The next chapter gives that nameless second operation a name, and sets teaching and steeping side by side. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Chapter 15 Teaching and Steeping, the Two Workings by Which Culture Is Handed Down