Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun

Teacher in America Reviews

• 
  Lobstergirl

  
  This is almost entirely about college and university teaching, not K-12. Vast swathes of it are outdated to the point of embarrassment, although his discussion of PhD degrees remains relevant (I didn't know that they were already problematic in 1944), and I pretty much agree with him that children should be allowed to read anything and everything, even trash; they'll sort out the wheat from the chaff as they grow older. (Although the popularity of paranormal erotica on Goodreads may belie this.)
  
  The relevance to Anchor Books (a popularizer of highbrow texts) of this topic was certainly due to large numbers of male students needing college educations before they traipsed off to World War II, and enrolling afterwards with the sustenance of the GI bill. High school degrees in the early 1940s gave no guarantee that American teenagers even knew where Germany, France, and Japan were on the map.
  
  Barzun's often confused and haphazard writing style here (oh, the paradox, as he complains about the writing of his young charges) would continue on in later works.
  
  My main problem with the book was its misogyny. Barzun doesn't specifically get to the topic of women until late chapters, but all along the way his language indicates that education is mostly something for boys and men, and the teaching profession (at the postgraduate level at least) is for men. Men, men, men. "The well-read boy has an easier time in college..." When "twelve men in a senior colloquium in economics [meet] for two consecutive hours" the discussion leader's "role is that of an orchestra conductor, except that neither he nor his men have a score before them." Mentions of girls and women are almost uniformly negative. "American schoolmarms..." "...reshaping of the schoolmarm's habits..." "The young lady in the shop who has inadvertently overcharged you will excuse herself by saying she hasn't a mathematical mind..." "Let Mary Jane take her time about puzzling out percentages while Tom Colin, whose father is a cashier, does them in his head and raps out the answers before the others..." A correspondent in the Times "complained with good reason that in twenty years of haunting public libraries he had never once been recommended a book by the damsel behind the desk..." A "sweet girl graduate" tells Barzun she didn't take any history in college, but a course called Social Maladjustment instead.
  
  There's a chapter titled "The Human Boy" which is about boy students. This is followed by "The Subjection of Women" and "Adults, Workers, and Marriageable Girls." According to Barzun there was once a war of the sexes in education, but that is over. "Equal rights have changed all that. Women learn everything that their brothers do; they become scholars and scientists..." But for Barzun there is still a huge problem remaining, because for all the George Eliots and Marie Curies, of which the numbers are miniscule, there remain the girls who attend college and then simply marry. Post high-school education is largely wasted on them. Indeed, once they become wives and mothers "they are probably handicapped by four years of leisure and learning". "Employers dread the sudden appearance, one Monday morning, of an engagement ring or of a notice that Mrs. X is leaving to become a mother. Even if a woman intends to continue working under these conditions, she cannot be said to have a career nor to be really making use of her mind."
  
  Once a wife and mother, "with a duty towards everybody but herself, her mind necessarily reverts to the feral state."
  
  "Robinson Crusoe would have a better chance of remaining cultivated alone on his island than a young married woman of modest income in a three room flat within a stone's throw of museums, concerts, and public libraries."
  
  Barzun isn't against girls going to college; he simply thinks the curriculum should be adapted for them. Postsecondary education for women necessitates "the abandonment of scholar-making, and the awareness that women are not men in skirts..."
  
  "Precisely because most young women are likely to lose touch with books, ideas, and current events on the far side of the altar, they must in the four years of college obtain such a view of the past and present that its outline will remain indelible once the details are gone."
  
  "It is true that as a general rule, girls are less interested than boys in theory, in ideas, in the logic of things and events. That is why their minds must not be cluttered up with details which they instinctively prefer - and make no use of. Girls are more conscientious and hardworking, they want to please their teachers more, and they do not want to be bothered by implications. ...one constantly meets women of fine intelligence who use their brains exclusively about concrete things such as clothes, food, and the persons whom they know. Their imagination about the distant or the abstract is completely atrophied; they are at the mercy of words, and their vehement opinions about war or strikes or politics are little short of brutish. Though it may be hard work, the minds of women students can be forced out of their grooves of conventionality and made to cope even with abstractions..."
  
  The purpose of college for girls should be to educate them just enough that they can have conversations with their husbands which go beyond groceries and clothes. The work they are given should be "close to that of men in scope and substance" yet must have "separate and different instructions." "If her husband is to continue to speak his thoughts freely to her, he must find her responsive and au courant. There is nothing that discourages a man's talk so much as a staring countenance and the words "I wouldn't know anything about that"... A college semi-education will also help out at parties. "Going to college...should produce companionable, even talkative adults of the female sex, whose arrival does not immediately make the host reach for a deck of cards."
• 
  Rosie Nguyễn

  Read this book online, and a thought flashed into my mind, that when I had a library for my own, this book was going to be the first book that I put there. Yes, it's the kind of book that we want to keep on our shelves, for its righteous content, its insight into the core of education, in America and all over the world generally, because it's pretty much the same everywhere on Earth.
  
  I made a mistake when reading the book, it was that I read it after a book about faster reading, hence I applied some techniques into reading. But this book is not for reading fast, but to be read slowly, and fathom, and cherish the work of educators, dreamers, changers, artists. Among the pages I found the answer for my problem: toil. Keep working hard toward my dream of an educator. Keep working hard.
• 
  MacK

  3 years ago, I was rummaging around a used book shop on Boston when I saw this book and thought "oh man, watch, this is gonna be hilariously outdated and borderline offensive!! Like those "101 Rules for Husbands"". Opening the book at random I met glowing, poetic language about the pressure, urgency, comedy, and confusion of modern education.
  
  "Oh man," I thought, "I might need this."
  
  After many years of considering picking it up, I took the plunge after Thanksgiving and found, in Barzun, an articulate and savvy writer and thinker. Attacking the broader scope of education from the viewpoint of an avid instructor with little investment in long standing traditions or allegiance to stakeholders, he offers a measured but mindful set of opinions.
  
  There were still some cringy moments, particularly any time the privileged Ivy League professor assumes what is good for women or underserved populations. But the insightful and artful high points on literacy and writing skills make it well worth a read.
  
  Amid a flood of well-intentioned edu-celebrity books, Barzun's book is well worth reading, for both style, and (some) substance.
• 
  Austin Hoffman

  3.5 Stars. Pretty solid overall, but a bit dated. It's very much Barzun's perspectives on things.
• 
  Rachel

  This was a difficult book to get through for a variety of reasons, though I was glad in the end that I stuck it out for his last ten or so chapters. Barzun rails against didactic forms of teaching throughout the whole book, but it is clear he does not see the irony in his first two chapters, which demand the reader accept his arguements solely based on his authority as a long-time educator and consultant. I, for one, was unprepared to do so, as I had not read anything else by him to base my judgement upon. I therefore found the great majority of the book to be pendantic - it seemed more like one giant rant akin to something one would find in a combox in the modern world than a work of scholarly critique. However, his last section of chapters which focused on the instruction of particular subjects, especially considering languages, mathematics, and the fine arts, were very well written and compelling. I would be interested in reading more of this author, though perhaps I will need a while to let the waves of his melodramatic ranting die down in my head.
• 
  Dustin Simmons

  This book didn't so much as shatter my teaching paradigm as it did remind me of why I want to be a teacher. After teaching for a few years, one can't help but collect the barnacles of current educational theory and practice (hokum, to use the author's term). Barzun's discussion of teaching, which he suggests is different from education, provided a much needed scrubbing and cleansing.
  
  This book speaks of principles and grand ideas, which is why it still rings true nearly 75 years after it was first written. This book is a must read for anyone interested in a Classical, Liberal Arts education.
• 
  max

  Dated, which is sad, because a good book on teaching should never be dated. The tone is weirdly off-putting. Sometimes Barzun makes excellent points -- he is at his best when he calls out professional educators on their phony jargon and sappy, often horribly bad ideas. And those kinds of points are made frequently enough here. But there isn't a whole lot more he has to offer after that. Breezy and anecdotal, fine -- but these kinds of books are a dime a dozen.
• 
  Bill

  Perhaps this is not Barzun's greatest or most famous, but if you are a teacher in America, you will not care that it is also a bit dated. I draw inspiration from this book in my role as a high school teacher.
• 
  Mary

  I highly reccomend this book!
• 
  Gregory

  Good, but sometimes hard to get into--times have changed so much since the 40s, when it was first published.
• 
  Justin

  Brilliant prose, great insights, yet somewhat dated.
• 
  Sue Giaimo

  This is an old book. It's content is still relevant since it discusses the role of schools and teachers in a child's growth.
• 
  Scott Harris

  Seminal work on the proper role of a teacher (university level, but applicable), issues faced, etc.
• 
  Aaron

  The more dated of his earlier works, but still insightful.