The Skillful Teacher

The Political Purposes of Teaching
In a very broad sense college teaching can be considered as a polit-
ical activity. By this I don’t mean an activity concerned to teach a
particular ideology, but one in which students are encouraged to ask
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awkward questions about why things (including college curricula,
definitions of what constitutes learning, or criteria for judging aca-
demic excellence) are organized the way they are. In political activ-
ities people are asked to consider whose interests are served by the
way these things are organized and how they might be organized dif-
ferently. Challenging official definitions of what issues and problems
are central to a curriculum or subject and substituting teachers’ and
learners’ own notions of these is a political process. Anytime teach-
ers encourage students to think in new and different ways, to
explore alternatives to commonsense interpretations of their expe-
riences, or to challenge the accuracy and validity of society’s givens,
their teaching is, in this sense, political.
Political teaching not only encourages people to develop a crit-
ically alert cast of mind, it also helps them develop a sense of
agency. Students with a sense of agency see themselves as creators
of events as much as reactors to them. Agency helps people to con-
struct their own meanings and then try to live by these, rather than
having these constructed by someone else. Creating these meanings
occurs through the arduous process of testing our emerging insights
and understandings against our experiences. College classrooms are
one of the settings where people can do this without needing to fear
where this process of meaning making may take them. When stu-
dents learn that their opinions and interpretations matter because
the teacher and other students take these seriously, important
changes in self-concept can occur. An enhanced feeling of self-
worth can be the affective underpinning to students’ attempts to
change aspects of their personal, occupational, and political lives.
Teachers who encourage students to ask awkward questions
regarding dominant ideas run real risks. Such students will likely
end up mistrusting simplistic solutions, be alert to political decep-
tion and able to resist propaganda, and earn from their teachers a
reputation as troublemakers. In some societies scholars are routinely
tortured and murdered because they foster critical questioning. The
consequences of encouraging students to critique prevailing assump-
tions in this country are not likely to be imprisonment, exile, or
Dealing with the Politics of Teaching
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KILLFUL
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EACHER
death at the hands of paramilitary vigilantes. But an inability to get
one’s work published, progressive isolation within one’s own insti-
tution, or the denial of promotion and tenure are all common
penalties for teaching politically. So, rather than teaching being the
last refuge of the politically disinterested, it is actually one of the
most immensely politicized occupations people can choose.