"In order that a man's whole heart may be in teaching he must be thoroughly imbued with the vital
importance and absolute truth of what he has to teach; while in order that he may have any measure
of success in learning he must be penetrated with a sense of the unsatisfactoriness of his present
condition of knowledge. The two attitudes are almost irreconcilable. But just as it is not the
self-righteous man who brings multitudes to a sense of sin, but the man who is most deeply conscious
that he is himself a sinner, and it is only by a sense of sin that men can escape its thraldom; so it
is not the man, who thinks he knows it all, that can bring other men to feel their need of learning,
and it is only a deep sense that one is miserably ignorant that can spur one on in the toilsome path
of learning. That is why, to my very humble apprehension, it cannot but seem that those admirable
pedagogical methods, for which the American teacher is distinguished, are of little more consequence
than the cut of his coat, that they surely are as nothing compared with that fever for learning that
must consume the soul of the man who is to infect others with the same apparent malady."
—Charles Sanders Peirce, "Methods For Attaining Truth", [in CP 5.583], 1898
"Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it.
And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger
store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because
what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be
learned than—learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we learn nothing
from him, if by 'learning' we now understand merely the procurement of useful information.
The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he still has far more to learn than
they—he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable
than the apprentices. The teacher is far less sure of his material than those who learn are of
theirs. If the relation between teacher and the learners is genuine, therefore, there is never
a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.
It still is an exalted matter, then, to become a teacher—which is something else entirely than
becoming a famous professor."
—Martin Heidegger, "Was Heisst Denken?" ["What Is Called Thinking?"], 1954
"A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.
Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information,
and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again.
There's no more organized information. I'm trying to establish within my seminars disorganized
information, which students can start practicing their moves on."
—Peter Schjeldahl, "Why Artists Make the Worst Students," The Chronicle of Higher Education 1998.11.27.
