— Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

Telling . . . and more
Few students have the chance to study under one great teacher. Fewer still have the chance to study under two. I was fortunate enough to study under two great professors in courses I had back-to-back. Though both teachers were genuinely first-rate, they could hardly have been more different.

At 10 a.m., I had Mark Noll’s course in the Reformation. When the wall clock indicated the proper starting time, he promptly and dutifully began to lecture. He lectured in complete sentences and in outline form, so that the information he imparted was organized, articulate and accessible. When the wall clock indicated the time to end, he ended — his lecture complete and the data well covered.

In Noll’s class, we knew always where we were and what he was talking about. As students, we rarely spoke, intent instead upon gathering up all the good information he gave us. At the end of each hour with Noll, I could count on an impressive case of writer’s cramp, acquired from writing down furiously all the well-organized and impressively-presented information he dispersed, information I use in some of my own classes more than 25 years later.

From Noll I learned that good teaching entails good telling. It entails the well articulated and reasonably arranged fruit of one’s own careful reading, incisive thinking and expansive research. For that lesson I am enormously grateful. I was taught it by one of the best.

At 11 a.m., I walked downstairs for a course in the Old Testament, taught by John Linton. I remember vividly my first class hour with him. As I sat in the classroom, waiting for the first day’s lecture to begin, a guy in old blue jeans, a white t-shirt, muddy combat boots, and a torn army jacket began to spout off about why we could not believe the book of Jonah was true. I remember thinking about how much trouble he would be in once the professor arrived.

After nearly 10 minutes of what I considered an impious harangue, the deeply disturbing truth began to sink in: He was the professor.

“Why is he attacking the Bible?” I wondered.

As I looked around the room, I could see my friends’ faces turning red, the veins in their necks sticking out, and their hands shooting into the air, trying to raise objections.

But he didn’t call on them; he just kept going.

He raised textual, theological, historical, and ethical objections of nearly every sort in his assault on Jonah. He showed no mercy, either to the text or to us.

When the hour ended, he told us to come back Wednesday and tell him why what he had said was false. “We’ve got him pegged now,” we thought. “We know what he’s up to.”

On Wednesday he shot down every one of the lame defenses and thoughtless pat answers we offered for the Bible in general and for Jonah in particular — every one. The effect that morning was even more devastating than that of the previous class period. Now we had no reason to believe what we believed about the Bible; and we knew it.

The assignment was the same: “Come back on Friday and tell me why what I said Monday was false.” We complained and we wondered: “Why is he doing this to us, and at a college where they believe that the Bible is the word of God?”

History repeated itself Friday.

“Come back Monday and tell me why what I said was false.”

“I don’t want to think about this stuff all weekend,” I thought to myself. “Doesn’t this guy know what weekends are for?”

Apparently he did.

We came back to class on Monday with a few reasons that even Linton could not refute. By Wednesday we had an entire hour full of them.

Then it dawned on me: Teaching is telling . . . and more.

Noll was the “telling;” Linton was the “and more.” The combination was profound and life-changing.

Good teaching includes dispensing, in palatable and comprehensible form, loads of good information, which are the building blocks of understanding. But good teaching also includes helping students carefully to evaluate, correlate, arrange, articulate, and either defend or reject information. Acquisition, analysis, and articulation are the constituent parts of education. They are indispensable. Together they teach you how to think. If you know how to think, you’ll know what to think.

Because of Noll and Linton, I came to understand that at the end of a perfect class hour, if such a thing were to exist, students would leave the room both with writer’s cramp, from having written down loads of good information, and mind cramp, from having thought about it in bold, incisive, even ingenious ways.

I’d like to think that such conclusions about teaching and learning are both common sense and commonly held.

They are not.

II. Telling . . . and less
In many Christian colleges, “telling and more” becomes “telling and less.” By that I mean that education in some schools and some classrooms degenerates into mere indoctrination. In such schools and classrooms, students are not taught how to think by processing good data with insight and care; they are merely inducted into the party line. They are rendered supposedly safe and suitable by their institutionally induced subscription to acceptable thoughts, if “thoughts” is indeed the right word for insufficiently examined mental conformity. Students trained in that way are neither safe nor suitable.

In some Christian colleges, the goal is not to teach students how to think with brilliance, clarity or insight, it is to make them agree, to make them conform, as if those schools did not realize that education is your way out of group-think, not into it.

You can make students conform to an institutionally approved set of beliefs in many ways, not the least of which is lower grades for dissenters. Some professors, for example, are looking not for students, but for followers, and they grade down any student who does not conform to their own set of pet ideas, as if agreement with them were agreement with God and truth. Good teachers ought to be willing to give the best grades to a student whose views they disagree with, even abominate, if that student can display both mastery of data and mastery of thought.

The Christian schools that hire and then tenure professors such as I am describing here do their students and their Lord precious little good service. They act as if they have forgotten that the truth itself, not our own pale and perhaps truncated version of it, sets us free. Good teachers recognize the possible difference between their own views of the truth and the truth itself. Good teachers know it is possible for them to be wrong, even when they are firmly convinced they are right.

No school has all the truth. No school has only truth. Nor do any of its professors. Given that we have several hundred Christian schools and colleges of nearly every kind and stripe in America, all with somewhat varying versions of truth and virtue, it is not possible that they all are right. Quite the opposite: Logic requires that they must be wrong somewhere, some of them probably on several important counts. But their arrogant and fearful pedagogy hides that fact from all but their most insightful students, just as it hides it from those schools and professors themselves. In their hands, the liberating ministry of truth is sometimes set at naught. Sadly, such schools and professors are not free. Even more sadly, they cannot give to their students what they themselves do not have. Those intellectually enslaved students go forth into the world unable to give anything like a compelling reason for the hope they have in Christ.

Some Christian schools and professors need to learn well the enormous and important difference between training the brain and washing it.

Questions or comments about this article? E-mail Dr. Bauman at michael.bauman@hillsdale.edu. Unless otherwise specified, e-mail will be considered for publication.