Post on 28-Mar-2023
HUMILITY IN TEACHING
Leonard J. Waks, Temple University
Introduction
What are the traits of the great teachers? When we are
training teachers, what are the most important traits that we
should be seeking to develop? When we are selecting candidates
from among the applicants for a teaching position, which traits
should be looking for as most important?
Many lists of such traits have been generated. To take one
recent example Mark Goldberg, writing in an ASCD handbook,1 lists
a number of familiar traits: effective classroom management
skills, expert use of instructional methods, in-depth knowledge
of the subject matters of their curriculum areas. Without
question, such traits are representative of the aims of current
teacher training and teacher candidate selection.
Other lists, however, emphasize profoundly different traits
– ones rarely considered when preparing or judging teachers.
1 Goldberg, The Qualities of Great Teachers, Chapter 26 in Marge Sherer, ed.,Keeping Good Teachers, ASCD, online at http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/104138/chapters/The-Qualities-of-Great-Teachers.aspx
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Theresa Thomas, in a list prepared by for the Catholic
Education Resource Center, starts by explicitly rejecting
familiar traits such as those selected by Goldberg. She states
that great teaching has nothing much to do with academic
credentials, outstanding intellect or measurable knowledge
expertize. 2
First on her Thomas’s list of ten key traits of great
teachers is humility. As Thomas further explains, “Great teachers
speak simply. They don't need to impress with their knowledge.
They are comfortable with what they know and eager to learn what
they do not.” Other traits she selects are related to humility.
Great teachers are patient: they “bear misfortune, difficulty, and
annoyances without complaint,” remaining calm “no matter how many
mistakes the student makes or how many times the teacher needs to
explain.” Great teachers also seek to learn from their own
students. “They know they do not know everything. They are not
threatened by a student's thoughtful question or outstanding
2 Thomas, Ten Traits of a Great Teacher, Catholic Education Resource Center, online at http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/education/catholic-contributions/ten-traits-of-a-great-teacher.html
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aptitude. They do not take it personally when a student asks
'why', wants more information or challenges a fact.”
Thomas’s emphasis on humility is in line with Catholic
teachings about the moral virtues. A quote widely attributed to
St. Augustine, for example, states that “Humility is the
foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which
this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue
except in mere appearance.” 3
But the cardinal significance of humility in teaching is not
confined to Catholic teachings. Humility is also central to the
moral teachings of Stoicism, and through the Stoics, has spread
throughout Western civilization. In a similar list to Thomas’s,
Maria Orlando refers at least implicitly to humility as a
cardinal virtue. 4 She places respect for students as the most
important trait: by this, as she explains, she means that great 3The quote is found all over the web. It can be found in Kim S. Cameron and Gretchen M. Spreitzer eds., The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, Oxford University Press, 2011, page 260, but no original source is given there. .
4 Orlando, Nine Characteristics of a Great Teacher, Philosophy of Teaching,
Higher Education Strategies from Magna Publications, online at http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/philosophy-of-teaching/nine-characteristics-of-a-great-teacher/
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teachers take seriously the ideas of their students. They are
skilled leaders (not classroom managers); they engage students in
shared decision-making. They are flexible, in that they can
recognize when their lessons are not working out, and they search
for new ways to reach students. Finally, they are collaborative;
they do not see themselves as weak for needing help, but rather
recognize their need for further learning and seek constructive
criticism and advice as an opportunity to grow as teachers.
In order to extend our understanding of the relationship
between humility and teaching, in this paper I investigate both
humility and teaching as philosophical concepts and consider
their conceptual connections. In doing so, I have found that
humility is related conceptually to teaching in unexpected ways.
I offer some reflections on the term and its origins, and then
move on to the concept of humility, distinguishing between
negative and positive humility and offering a distinction between
two types of positive humility- analytic or self-critical, and
synthetic or trans-critical, humility. Finally I relate both of
these types of positive humility to philosophical conceptions of
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teaching, and in doing so provide firm intellectual support for
the intuition that humility is a cardinal virtue in teaching.
Humility
The term humility derives from the Greek chamai, meaning on the
ground. It passed through the Latin humus, meaning ground, soil, earth:
hence the English exhume, meaning to take out of the ground.
From humus came Latin humilis, one of the most frequently used
Latin words, meaning lowly, small, mean, humble, obscure, poor, or
insignificant. From humilis it is a direct shot to the Latin humilitas
and the English humility, the condition of being lowly, mean, humble etc.
From this term we also get the English humiliate, meaning to put
someone down (as on the ground), to make a person appear or feel small or
insignificant. Clearly, it is a great misfortune to be humiliated, to
be rendered mean or humble.
We can get an initial hint at the paradoxical nature of the
term, however, when we consider the meaning of grounded. It may
signify the condition of being put down, as when a parent grounds
her children, e.g., confines them to home for misbehavior. But a
person also may become grounded in the sense of integrated,
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whole, in touch, after e.g. a period of upset and out-of-touch-
ness.
Consider also the meaning of humus itself in English, not as
the soil or earth but as the dark material in soil, produced by
the decomposition of organic materials to their elemental states;
humus is that which is simple, elementary – that supplies the
nutrients and retains the water essential for growth.
It is in this or a closely related sense that the Hebrew
Bible takes up humility. Genesis speaks of Adam and Eve as born
of God’s love, but through pride (= lack of humility) choosing
disobedience and hence getting expelled from God’s perfect garden
at Eden. Exodus then relates God’s chastisement of his people in
the desert, humiliating them, breaking them down, but leaving a
remnant – those humble in recognition of their total dependence
on God and hence ready to grow in his Truth. This story is
isomorphic with the New Testament story of Jesus, a child of
poverty, a child also born through God’s love, who undergoes his
own humbling purification in the desert and re-appears to exalt
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the humble and promise that that they would inherit the earth.
Clearly in the Biblical sense humility is a blessing.
Two Types of Humility
Dictionary definitions of humility focus on the first,
negative, meaning. Humility is the state or condition of being
humble: lowly or insignificant, submissive, ranking low in a
hierarchy or scale, having a modest opinion or estimate of one's
own importance. Pushed to the extreme, such definitions suggest
‘pathological humility,’ the condition of considering oneself and
one’s deeds of little or no value, experiencing feelings of
worthlessness, saying of oneself ‘I’m no good, I’m lower than a
worm’ etc. Pathological humility can be misleading when
considering humility as a virtue. A quote widely attributed to C.
S. Lewis states: “True humility is not thinking less of yourself;
it is thinking of yourself less.” 5 Little good is likely to come
from negative self-estimations and feelings, for teaching or
anything else.
5A recent investigation casts doubt on the authenticity of this attribution. See William O’Flahrety, Quotes NOT By Lewis, A Preliminary Examination, Essential C. S. Lewis (blog), January 26, 2014. Motivational writer Rick Warren has used this quote without providing a source.
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But we can also find even in these negative definitions the
roots of more positive dimensions of humility. Clearly it is a
good thing to have a healthy modesty about one’s importance or
significance. One can proudly cling to one’s opinions, but it is
better to submit humbly to arguments and evidence. This is no
doubt what Emerson meant in his essay on compensation when he
said “A great man is always willing to be little.”6 So I want to
explore the positive dimensions of humility, and distinguish two
positive types of humility, to be called analytical or self-
critical humility and synthetic or a-critical humility. In doing
so, I will be drawing from the literature on listening in
education.
Analytical or Self-Critical Humility
Let’s start with self-critical humility. The most common
listed synonym for ‘critical’ is ‘fault-finding.’ A person who is
critical is one who objects, challenges, detracts. But there is
6 The relevant passage: “Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When heis pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.”
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also the sense of critical associated merely with being
analytical, logical, discriminating. This is the sense of
‘critical’ in ‘critical thinking’; a critical thinker is not one
who merely finds faults in other peoples’ positions and
arguments, but one capable of discriminating judgment, one as
sensitive to positive as to negative values.
Those exhibiting self-critical humility are capable of
discriminating judgments regarding themselves. They are in this
sense self-aware. People exhibiting this kind of humility do not
necessarily or even typically have a low opinion of themselves or
their deeds or opinions. They may, on the contrary, believe
themselves to be bright, knowledgeable, capable, considerate, and
virtuous in other ways. But they are also fallibilists; they
readily acknowledge the possibility that they can learn from
criticism, improve their characters, change their opinions. They
are open-minded. When meeting up with those with different points
of view, they listen carefully and when they disagree they
consider the merits of opposing views and genuinely and fairly
reconsider the adequacy of grounds for their own.
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One must note in passing that just as there is false
humility, the pose of modesty to disguise pride and ambition, so
there is also pseudo-humility, the inauthentic pose of open-
mindedness or self-critical humility. Those exhibiting pseudo-
humility talk a good game regarding open-mindedness, but when
their own beliefs and practices are called into question they
become defensive and even aggressive. Those adopting such a pose
exalt themselves over e.g., individuals and groups adopting
fundamentalist or anti-liberal perspectives –‘I’m open-minded,
you are closed-minded –I’m better than you’ – and yet remain
closed to considerations of the values inherent in these
perspectives – tradition, security, solidarity, etc.
Listening and Self-Critical Humility
Self-critical humility is central to Sophie-Haroutunian-
Gordon’s account of listening, and I now turn to that account to
provide a clear example of this species of humility. Haroutunian-
Gordon begins her account by noting that:
In order to pursue common goals, people are required to
listen to one another so as to learn what others think
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and value. In some instances, people must listen to
views that challenge their own. Such may be the case
when people come from different cultural or economic
backgrounds.
Differences in perspective, one might add, are hardly limited to
those stemming from cultural or economic backgrounds. Distinct
members of a single group often disagree in quite fundamental
ways about all sorts of things: the quality of a television show
or movie, the pros v. cons of our high tech society, the health
risks of sun-bathing, the value of a college education. These in-
group differences may be more unsettling; ‘how can someone so
like me have such different views’?
As Haroutunian-Gordon notes, not everyone will choose to
listen to challenging perspectives. Some may stop simply
listening, leading to a break down in cooperative conversation.
She adds:
However, by listening to a challenging viewpoint, one
may gain perspective on one’s own views and values.
One may, upon reflection, decide to modify one’s
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beliefs, and one may also gain help in so doing from
the very perspective that posed the challenge.
Listening to those with different perspectives may,
Haroutunian-Gordon notes, be interrupted by ideas expressed by
others that listeners find false, outrageous, or even
incomprehensible. Some listeners may at that point withdraw from
the conversation, but others may use the interruption to ask
themselves: what can the speaker possibly mean by their
statements, or what grounds could they possibly believe them? In
reflecting on these questions, moreover, listeners may then: 1)
recognize in themselves heretofore tacit beliefs or prejudices; 2)
question these beliefs or their grounds for accepting them; and
3) shift so as to grasp more of the details of the speaker’s
challenging perspective. And the challenging perspective, once
grasped, may then even be used to evaluate one’s heretofore tacit
beliefs, and provide ideas for modifying them. For Haroutunian-
Gordon, this kind of questioning and self-questioning lies at the
heart of listening. As she says, when confronted by difference,
some may follow these steps, and when they do so they are
exhibiting what I am calling self-critical humility.12
Let’s look at the example more closely. Here listeners first
attend critically to the speakers’ utterances. Upon locating
challenging differences that they may at first be tempted to
label as faults, they turn critical attention away from the
speakers and back upon themselves to locate the unexamined
beliefs that may lie behind their own negative judgments.
Evaluating and suspending these prejudicial beliefs opens up for
listeners even more details of speakers’ perspectives, which the
listeners then use further to evaluate and modify their own
points of view. Critical reason is used to evaluate the other,
then the self. Let’s take note of two other features of this
situation: the listeners pay a lot of attention to themselves;
and they rely on themselves to come to better or more adequate
beliefs. Self-critical humility resides in the willingness to
question the correctness of one’s own perspectives in the face of
challenge, and to self-correct as one deems necessary.
Synthetic or Trans-Critical Humility
There is also a quite different species of positive
humility, drawing on capacities for holistic synthesis rather
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than critical analysis, related directly to the underlying notion
of humus as the sustainer of life and growth. Persons exhibit
this kind of humility to the extent that they weaken or suspend
not just their beliefs and prejudices but their personal
boundaries. Their personal selves then become less determinate,
and they become, as individuals, relatively unimportant and
insignificant in the situation. Having less in the way of
distinct individuality to protect and defend, feeling less
vulnerable as a self, their worlds become in their eyes less
dangerous. They suspend not merely the conviction that their
beliefs are true and actions good, but even the use of their
critical capabilities for value judgment – capabilities most
alive in the face of putative threats. Instead of discriminating
details within or analyzing elements of given situations, they
take situations in in their entirety, as synthetic unities in
which they and others function as incomplete parts. Instead of
imposing a dualism of themselves and others, of speakers and
listeners, of you and me or us, they abide in a psychological
world embracing all as essential parts of the whole. While they
make functional distinctions between persons, they see
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individuals as no more separate and isolated than e.g., the right
hand and the left, or two organ systems of one organism. They see
personal separateness more as an illusion than a metaphysical
truth. John Dewey brings this experience into focus in his
discussion of communication in which the individuals engaged are
so closely intertwined in the transaction that it can be
difficult even to say where one ends and the other begins.7
The synthetically humble are typically well-acquainted with
their analytical and critical sides, and can make use of them as
necessary and useful. But they are also aware of the tricks and
snares of critical reason. They view critical and analytical
thinking as a product of organic evolution, useful in identifying
and avoiding danger. But danger is not ubiquitous, and the
application of critical discrimination can create a sense of
difference and opposition where no significant difference or
opposition exists, and even convert cooperative friendship into
hostile opposition by turning a critical gaze upon others and
making them feel vulnerable and self-protective. Those exhibiting
synthetic humility understand that analytical thinking can
7 DE, mw.9.19415
occlude the ability to embrace and merge synthetically with
larger wholes, to come together with others, to meet and to share
openly, to cooperate in collective action and celebrate their
common lives and achievements. They grasp that critical reason
can be a curse as well as a blessing, and they pray periodically
to be freed from it.
They view themselves and others as functions in in rich
biological and cultural fields, and understand that their
energies, capabilities and achievements are utterly dependent
upon these contexts. Thus they do not strive to make themselves
autonomous; rather they submit to and even embrace their
dependence on larger wholes. While not unaware of their specific
strengths and achievements, they accept them as gifts from beyond
themselves. They are thus grateful for their good fortune in
receiving them, and instead of feeling proud, may even feel
humbled by them. They claim no credit, desert or entitlement
because of them.
Because they see themselves and others as part of a larger
whole, they seek to give of themselves, to contribute to the
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whole and to others as its component parts. They turn attention
from themselves to others, making of themselves the humus, the
structure and nutrient matter for others’ growth. Suspending pre-
judgments about how others should grow, they watch with
fascination and delight as others grow in myriad ways following
their own trajectories within their given cultural milieus. They
respond to others with the free, spontaneous gift of their
awareness and practical intelligence. They don’t worry much about
how right or good they are, abiding in the faith that if they
only can get their limited personal selves with all of the
associated biases out of the way, they can serve as conduits for
an intelligence larger than any they can identify as their own.
In contrast to self-critical humility, those exhibiting
synthetic humility in listening turn attention from themselves.
They do not seek to patch up or improve themselves by their own
efforts, trusting that painful experience will come unbidden to
do that good work. They are insignificant and unimportant in
their own eyes, not because they judge themselves negatively, but
because, with their attention focused on others, they see
themselves as relatively minor characters even in their own 17
conscious lives. In the discussion of listening in education, I
have labeled this kind of listening as apophatic, a term borrowed
from theology where it refers to the suspending of thinking so as
to be open to the unthinkable God..
The notion of synthetic humility lends itself to expression
in religions language, and is found and developed in profound
ways throughout all the great religions. However, most people
have been visited with moments of synthetic humility. There is
nothing inherently religious about it in any narrow doctrinal
sense; secular philosophers have found no great difficulty
grasping or developing it.
Humility in Teaching
Analytical or Self-Critical Humility in Teaching
Self-critical humility looms large in the analytical
philosophy of teaching. For Israel Scheffler teaching is not a
matter of informing or shaping young people, but rather entering
into rational dialogues with them, presenting ideas but also
revealing the reasons that support them. “Teaching requires us to
reveal our reasons to the student, and, by doing so, to submit
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them to his evaluation and criticism” 8 (Language of Education).
Teachers thus open themselves to the independent judgment of
their students and the prospect of learning from them. For
Scheffler, the disposition to open oneself in this way lies at
the heart of the concept of teaching; those relying upon drill,
memorization, charisma, propaganda or other methods for fixing
belief are not just teaching poorly – they are not teaching at
all. Thus teaching conceptually implies self-critical humility.
Thomas F. Green echoes this idea.9 Green also situates
teaching in a broad class of methods used to affect learners,
including training, indoctrinating, conditioning, propagandizing,
etc. Indoctrinating, for example, is employed in order to form
specific predetermined beliefs in learners. Teaching, by
contrast, concerns itself not merely with what is learned, but
also with the manner in which the acquired beliefs are held.
Teaching aims for beliefs held on the basis of reasons and
evidence. Teaching at heart is entering into conversations aimed
at truth, where teachers present ideas, offer reasons, and
8 Israel Scheffler, The Language of Education, Springfield MA, C. C. Thomas, 1960. 9 Thomas F. Green, A Topology of the Teaching Concept, Studies in Philosophy and Education , 3 (4):284-319 (1964).
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consider objections fairly. Thus the practice of teaching
presupposes certain attitudes including what we have labeled
self-critical humility, and the same attitudes result from
teaching.
Paul Komisar’s analysis of teaching extends this id
further.10 Komisar distinguishes between teaching at the
enterprise level, where teachers coordinate many kinds of
activities (including teaching narrowly understood) with the
intention to induce learning; at the enterprise level teachers
may be engaged in cajoling, or haranguing as well as teaching.
But when we ask what teaching itself, as distinct from these
‘cousined’ activities, consists in, Komisar offers what he admits
to be a rough categorization into three kinds of teaching acts.
The first two are ‘supporting acts’: (1) ‘learner donor acts,’
intended to contribute directly and pointedly to learning: e.g.,
prompting, cueing, and drilling; and (2) ‘learner enhancing acts’
intended to place learners in fit states to receive instruction:
e.g., reducing anxiety, arousing interest, and focusing
attention. The third, which Komisar, like other analytical 10Paul Komisar, Teaching: Act and Enterprise, Studies in Philosophy and Education 6 (2), 1968, 168-93
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philosophers of teaching, sees as most central to the teaching
concept, consists of (3) intellectual acts such as explaining,
justifying, distinguishing, analyzing, synthesizing, etc.
(Komisar provides a very long list of these).
These intellectual acts are not themselves aimed, at first
instance, at the production of learning, but at intellectual
awarenesses or insights. These awarenesses, in turn, provide the
intellectual bedrock for the teaching enterprise. The aim of the
geometry teacher in proving theorem 21 to his students, for
example, is not to get them to learn or memorize the theorem or
its proof. That learning, on Komisar’s analysis, may better be
acquired by drill and memorization. The aim of teaching – as an
intellectual act - is that the students ‘get’ the proof that
theorem 21 – grasp that it follows from the axioms, postulates
and prior theorems. Komisar calls this ‘getting’or grasping’ an
‘upshot’. What makes the act of theorem proving an act of
teaching is that the teacher (a) divulges his intention (proving
theorem 21 by deriving it from axioms and theorems), and (b)
achieves the awareness intended (that theorem 21 has been proved)
by displaying the reasons that serve as the intelligible grounds 21
for that awareness. Komisar makes clear that such intellectual
acts are made within exchanges where students as well as teachers
contribute to the reasoning that leads to awareness, with both
subject to criticism. So as with other analysts of the teaching
concept, Komisar makes self-critical humility a necessary element
of a central kind of teaching act.
In all of these examples, self-critical humility consists in
a willingness to stand corrected by and learn from students. But
self-critically humble teachers can go even further, by seeking
deliberately to learn from students - by designing situations
where students have something worthwhile to teach and occasions
to teach it. As instructional coach Jim Knight puts it,
“When we approach students with humility, we resist
the temptation (to rely on our superior knowledge and
power). Furthermore, we look to our students with a
genuine desire to learn from them. How great it must
feel for children to know that they taught their
teacher something. .. Teachers do a lot to engender
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students’ enthusiasm just by being humble enough to
learn from them. 11
Synthetic or Trans-Critical Humility in Teaching
Komisar’s analysis of teaching usefully distinguishes the
intellectual component of teaching, even at the narrow ‘act’
level, from those components involving a broad emotional
sensitivity to learners: responding when they need a prompt to
achieve an awareness, or when they are too anxious to learn
without receiving caring attention from a teacher.
These dimensions of teaching were fore-grounded in early
feminist accounts of teaching. Jane Roland Martin argued that
Scheffler and other analysts were simply wrong in asserting that
‘teaching’ in the standard sense meant engaging in intellectual
exchanges.12 While such exchanges clearly had some place in
teaching, they argued, defining ‘teaching’ in terms of them
excluded clear senses of ‘teaching’ and in particular, the ways
women teach basic understandings and attitudes.
11 Knight, Humility, Radical Learners (blog), November 7th, 2010, online at http://www.radicallearners.com/humility/12Jane Roland Martin, Excluding Women from the Educational Realm, Harvard Educational Review 52, 1982, 133-48.
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Martin offers such examples as teaching through kindness,
modeling or patient showing. She then develops in more detail the
case of a mother patiently combing her two year old daughter’s
hair; Martin asserts that the mother is in such a case teaching
kindness not by rational exchange but by example. The mother is
not giving reasons or appealing to the rationality of her
daughter. 13
In this case, through the ritual of hair combing after the
bath, the mother’s personal boundaries vis a vis her daughter
weaken. She does not attend to her own personal needs and
feelings; rather her attention is focused entirely upon her
daughter, and in the act of combing becomes one with her, or to
put this idea another way, the mother blends with her daughter
13 Allen Pearson persuasively argued against this latter claim in Teaching, Reason and Risk, Studies in Philosophy of Education 16 (1-2), 1997, 103-111. Paraphrasing slightly, his counter-argument against Martin’s example is that to be teaching the mother must be combing her daughter’s hair in a manner that promotes the future development of a rational point of view with regard to child care. Her teaching in this manner allows her daughter to understand at afundamental level the meaning and the point of care, and that if the mother were not in this way attentive to the rationality of her daughter she would not be teaching care, but simply caring. Pearson seeks to show that Scheffler’s conception of teaching is compatible with the activities fore-grounded in feminist theories. While he is in my view correct about this, his argument side-steps Martin’s larger point, which is that on Scheffler’s conception, while these activities might play an important role in teaching contexts they do not count in themselves as teaching.
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within a larger mother-child-world synthetic whole such that it
would be hard to say where one ends or the other begins. This
might be taken as an example of humility in the sense indicated
by C. S. Lewis above, of “not thinking less of oneself, but of
thinking of oneself less.”
Nel Noddings further elaborated these ideas throughout her
large body of work. In Caring (1984) Noddings developed a
comprehensive ethic based on three elements central to synthetic
humility - receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness. She
distinguished ‘ethical caring’ from ‘natural caring’ – the sort
exhibited in Martin’s mother-daughter case. In ethical caring,
one cares not simply out of a natural instinct-like sentiment,
but because one ‘must’ – because one senses a moral obligation to
respond when addressed by another. The teaching relationship is
one of ethical caring: the teacher responds out of a felt sense
of obligation when addressed by learners. Teachers may, for
example, sense a need to modify a lesson or unit after surveying
the many different needs of her students. 14
14 Noddings, Caring, A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Morals, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.
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Noddings notes that the emphasis on dispassionate
rationality in teaching has tended to marginalize emotional
responsiveness. Teaching, however, is more than the rational
fostering of rational judgment – the dimension emphasized by
analytical philosophers of teaching. Instead it concerns itself
with the whole child seen as a synthetic unity within a larger
synthetic unity. “We must allow teachers and students to interact
as whole persons, and we must develop policies that treat the
school as a whole community”.15
Some feminists have criticized Noddings account as
portraying teachers in traditional female roles – as care givers
who give without receiving. This attention to receiving of
personal rewards or values contrasts sharply with Noddings’
emphases – receptivity to, relatedness with, responsiveness to
the other. The critique portrays teachers as self-interested
individuals with needs for e.g., attention, influence, money or
other personal rewards. Noddings (like Martin in the hair combing
example above), on the other hand, considers teaching, at least
in ideal cases, as transcending the isolated personal self, as
15 Noddings, Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, NY, Teachers College Press, 2005.26
“thinking about one’s self less,” of making a free contribution
to a whole within which teachers and learners are mutually
dependent parts. Teaching thus exemplifies synthetic humility.
Conclusion: Towards a New Philosophy of Teaching
In this paper I have offered a distinction between two
species of positive humility: analytical or self-critical
humility and synthetic or trans-critical humility. I have sought
to show that the former is implicit in the conception of teaching
advanced by such analytical philosophers of teaching as
Scheffler, Green and Komisar, and that the latter is implicit in
the feminist conception of teaching as advanced by Jane Roland
Martin and Nel Noddings. In this effort I have sought to provide
a firm intellectual basis for the intuition expressed in the
lists of teaching, provided in the opening section of this essay
by Theresa Thomas and Maria Orlando, that humility is a prime
virtue in teaching.
I want to conclude by noting that these contrasting notions
of teaching are compatible. While Scheffler defines teaching in
terms of rationality and criticism, and thus would not be likely
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to regard such acts as prompting students or reducing their
anxiety as teaching acts, Komisar makes ample room for them in
his more nuanced analysis. Indeed, the germ of the feminist
philosophy of teaching – the emphasis on learner-donor and
learner enhancing acts - is already fore-grounded and indeed,
well-developed, in Komisar’s account of teaching. Meanwhile,
while Martin and Noddings correctly insist that there is more to
teaching – even at the narrow act level - than rational exchange
and openness to the critical judgment of learners, they could
hardly deny – and don’t - the central place in teaching of truth
seeking, reason-giving and intellectual awareness. The
examination of humility thus opens a window upon a new synthetic
account of teaching drawing liberally from both analytical and
feminist philosophies of teaching.
Such an account of teaching raises questions about how we
might design teacher training programs to develop humility in
novice teachers, and how to detect or assess humility in
practicing teachers or candidates for teaching positions. But
these questions go beyond the scope of this paper and demand
another essay. 28