Is it in the test?
Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
What makes a great teacher?
Consider Socrates, one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. He never wrote a book. He made his mark through dialogue, through conversation.
And what about Jesus? Like Socrates, he “never wrote a book. He never taught in a classroom. He didn’t use blackboards or whiteboards or Powerpoint. He didn’t mark his disciples’ work or give them end-of-unit tests. He wasn’t a GCSE examiner, he didn’t attend educational conferences, and he didn’t go to staff meetings. But, for all that, he was most definitely a teacher.”
Maybe we should go back to basics and think about how education could be different if we took Socrates and Jesus as our examples.
Or maybe we could imagine what it would have been like had Socrates and Jesus had taught like contemporary schoolteachers. A few years ago, I had the privilege of speaking at a home education conference in Knock, Ireland. One of the other speakers, Fr Mark Byrne, began his talk something like this:
In one of the apocryphal gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible, we find the following passage:
And when Jesus had finished the Sermon on the Mount, Simon Peter put his hand up and said, “Lord, is this going to be in the test?”
Then Andrew said, “Are we supposed to have taken notes?”
And Philip said, “Why do we need to know this stuff?”
And Bartholomew said, “Is there going to be any homework?”
And John said, “The other disciples didn’t have to learn all this.”
And Matthew said, “What time’s this class supposed to finish?”
And Judas said, “When are we ever going to need any of this in the real world?”
Then one of the Pharisees stepped forward and asked Jesus for his lesson plans. And a Sadducee pointed out that Jesus hadn’t set out his learning objectives. And a scribe said that there hadn’t been a plenary.
And Jesus wept.
So how did Jesus teach?
He spent time with his disciples. A lot of time. This is where home educators have a huge advantage over schoolteachers. In primary schools, children tend to have a new teacher each year. As a secondary school teacher, I only see my students a few times a week over the course of a year or two. I get to know them, but not in the way Jesus knew his disciples or parents know their children.
Jesus also travelled. He went after the lost sheep. His disciples learned through the soles of their feet. They weren’t stuck behind desks in a classroom. Indeed, as one scholar of education in the ancient world points out, to speak about school as it is today “is often meaningless in the ancient world”.1 School meant “the activity carried on rather than … the person teaching, the student-teacher relationship, or the premises where teaching takes place. The teacher could be a friend, a parent, a priest, or someone hired to teach, and the classroom a room in a private house, the shaded porch of a temple, or the dusty ground under a tree”. As Neil Postman wryly puts it in The End of Education:
“It is not written in any holy book … that an education must occur in a small room with chairs in it.”
But we shouldn’t focus too much on the mechanics. The key point about Jesus’ teaching is that he gave his disciples himself. He was the lesson he taught. That is why home education is such a privilege and a challenge. We don’t need to worry about our ability to teach Physics or Latin or grammar. We shouldn’t fixate on tests and exams. As parents, the most important thing we can give our children is ourselves. Everything else flows from there.
Raffaella Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Scholars Press, 1996)