Isabel and I are always tossing justification for our profession back and forth.
These kinds of conversations obviously pick up around this time of year -- job hunting season.
Why are we doing what we are doing? What's the point? Is it worth it?
From a practical standpoint, these questions take a secondary importance to me since my more immediate vocation (as I see it) is to provide for my wife and future kids. Ideology aside, I'm willing to teach this stuff so long as the pay is good. One must eat.
Still, one must question the means by which one eats. If I were to conclude someday that there was something sinister afoot in my profession, I would have a moral responsibility to subvert or leave it.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
Typically, people justify teaching English with arguments such as
it makes people better able to express themselves
it makes people better citizens by showing them points of view different from their own (usually the point of view of the disenfranchised lower classes)
it "humanizes" students (whatever that means anymore)
it makes like more livable
These are all well and good, but I can't confess that any of them seem sufficient reasons to pursue a career in this field...and none of them seem valid reasons to encourage a student to major in the stuff.
But watching my students struggle so painfully with merely comprehending the centuries-old forms of English that we read makes me think that there is perhaps another reason worth pursuing this field.
One of Chesterton's pithy sayings considers how the truly democratic mind considers not only the opinions of those alive but those dead as well, that the wisdom of those gone before us ought to be consulted alongside the opinions of today. I'm not suggesting that we read literature as part of this trans-temporal democracy, although that certainly seems one way to do it.
Rather, what I'm attracted to is the idea that I'm teaching students how to comprehend and understand a foreign, alien, different cultural artifact.
To what end?
Many who lived and wrote in the Renaissance would argue that the purpose of the exercise should be, ultimately, to learn virture -- to perfect nature through art -- to be led by entertainment towards a nobility of soul.
I find that last part to be tricky in this modern, secular age. I don't know that I trust myself, or my colleagues, to shape students' morality.
In which case, it seems as though my job points towards teaching students how to read literature in order that they might enjoy literature. It's really the job of the literature to nudge them one way or the other morally. You can't enjoy it, if you can't understand it...which leaves me in the awkward position of the man who is constantly trying to make people laugh not by telling jokes but by explaining them.
Comments