In A Jane Austen Education1, William Deresiewicz writes about what he learned from Jane about learning. The lessons were manifested through a professor he had in graduate school, whose style he described as stupid questions and playing dumb. Here are various descriptions I pieced together:
He came across as eccentric, to say the least, if not actually soft in the head, and the impression was not dispelled by the questions he proceeded to ask. They seemed absurdly simple—silly, really, almost stupid, too basic and obvious to ask a class of freshmen, let alone a graduate seminar.
But when we tried to answer them, we discovered that they were not simple in the least. They were profound, because they were about all the things we had come to take for granted.
He was stripping the paint off our brains. He was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew. He was teaching us to approach the world with curiosity and humility rather than the professional certainty we were all trying so hard to cultivate. In order to answer his questions, we had to forget everything and start over again from the beginning. “Answers are easy,” he would later say. “You can go out to the street and any fool will give you answers. The trick is to ask the right questions.”
We were graduate students, stepping uncertainly into a new phase of life. No, that actually gives us too much credit. We were coping with feelings of insecurity in an intimidating new world by pretending to know more than we really did, and being rather competitive about it, to boot. My professor was the opposite. He pretended to know less than he did, refused to play the role of wise man or sage. Or rather, he knew that he knew less than he did, because he recognized that everything he knew—all his own assumptions and conceptions—was subject to constant reappraisal.
He taught by provoking, taking us by surprise, making us laugh, throwing us off balance, forcing us to figure out what was going on and what it meant—getting us to think, not telling us how.
If you said something vague or half-formed, he’d pretend to misunderstand you, as if he were slightly dense, so that by fighting your way back to what you really meant, you’d have to figure out what you’d been trying to say in the first place.
I’d catch myself walking out of his office backwards, as if I’d been in the presence of royalty.
So learning is synonymous with questioning. Well, a certain type of questioning, because not all questions are created equal:
He taught by asking questions, and so did I, but only now did I see how utterly different our questions were. Mine were really answers in disguise, as if I were hosting some sadistic from of Jeopardy! I wasn’t a teacher, I was a bully. I wasn’t helping them; I was manipulating them—and doing so, to a far greater extent than I wanted to admit, in order to gratify my own ego. I was telling them what to think, even if, by trying to get them to say it first—that is, by putting words in their mouths—I was pretending not to. I was trying to turn them into little versions of me, instead of better versions of themselves.
When my professor asked a question, it wasn’t because he wanted us to get or guess “the” answer; it was because he hadn’t figured out the answer yet himself, and genuinely wanted to hear what we had to say.
Instead of thinking of a session as a kind of engineering problem—how to transfer a certain quantity of material from my head to my students’—I started to see it as an opportunity to incite them to discover the powers that were waiting, unborn, within them, and in doing so take both themselves and me by surprise. I went from feeling that a good class was one in which I had “gotten my points across” to regarding it as one in which I had learned something myself—not because my learning was the goal, but because if I had found out something new, it meant that I had given my students the freedom to think their way beyond me.
Students don’t come to school with open minds, they come with all the concepts they’ve already acquired, and they can’t wait to project them onto everything they read. If you’re in college, you go hunting for “symbolism” or “foreshadowing” or “Christ figures.” If you’re in graduate school, it’s “constructions of otherness” or “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power.” Either way, you end up with a very elaborate theory that bears no relationship to what’s actually going on in front of you. The job of a teacher, I now understood, is neither to affirm your students’ notions nor to fill them with your own. The job is to free them from both.
Crude summary: Teaching means freeing people from their naïve notions, and it is best done by arousing, by letting them think their own damn thoughts, by asking questions you don’t know the answers to, rather than by trying to inject knowledge into skulls by discipline pump.
What it comes down to is teaching through feeling:
One of the most shocking things about his courses is what they didn’t involve. The rituals of the graduate seminar, all of them devised to turn us into professional scholars, were entirely absent. No lists of secondary sources or packets of supplemental reading, no theoretical frameworks or critical jargon. No seminar papers, even though they were supposed to be the principal means by which we received our training: twenty-page essays, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, our first baby steps in writing for professional publication. Instead, he simply wanted us to write a one-page paper every week. One page, with no citations and no outside reading. Just you and the book and one of the fiendishly simple questions he liked to ask.
Literary study, he was trying to tell us, was not about learning a secret language or mastering a bag of theoretical tricks. It was not about inventing a new, professional personality, either. It was about getting back in touch with the ways we used to read—the ways people read when they’re reading for fun—but also about intensifying them, making them more thoughtful and deeply informed. “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” It was about trusting our responses, but examining them, too.
Feelings are the primary way we know about novels—which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices. Our feelings are what novelists work with, the colors on their palette. Curiosity, perplexity, exhilaration; the buzz in the brain, the tumult in the soul—that, my professor was telling me, was what I had to work with; that was where my scholarship should start. With the love of reading that had gotten me into graduate school in the first place.
In Pride and Prejudice, I had learned to put thinking above feeling. Now I learned a more complex idea about the relationship between the two. It is good to be in touch with your feelings, but it is even better if you also think about them. Feelings, Austen was saying, are the primary way we know about the world—the human world, anyway, the social world, the people around us. They are what we start with, when it comes to making our ethical judgments and choices.
Learning to read means learning to live. Keeping your eyes open when you’re looking at a book is just a way of teaching yourself to keep them open all the time.
Learning to learn means keeping yourself mentally young:
Now I understood how my professor had managed to stay so young. He never settled into certainty, never stopped challenging himself—and getting us to challenge him—as hard as he challenged us. There was a paradox, I realized, at the heart of Austen’s work. She showed us how to grow up, but she also wanted us to remain young.
The passage that hit me the hardest was when Deresiewicz said that learning these lessons freed him to grow up:
Austen’s work contained a paradox, yet it didn’t have to be a tragedy. You can get older but still remain young. That, I started to realize, was part of what had been keeping me from growing up for all those years, the fear of foreclosing possibilities, of turning into another boring adult with a spouse and a house.
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1This is now my third (1,2) long post about the book, and I have only read three chapters. There are three more to go, and I might do a long post on each of them, because it has been that good.
I take this book to be strong evidence for my theory that I should choose books based on the writer, not the subject. I would’ve never picked this book up just looking at the cover, but reading Deresiewicz’s commencement inspired me to seek more of his words, and hoo boy I’m glad I did.
