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

1

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

2

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/

3

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

4

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,

5

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

6

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.

7

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.”

8

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.

9

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

10

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

11

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

13

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

14

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

16

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

18

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).

19

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

20

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

22

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.

23

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.

24

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.

25

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

27

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

29