The Valor of Teaching

by AGNES DE MILLE

1

IN THE gypsying about that my work entails, I have lately had occasion to hear at women’s colleges several commencement addresses attempting to evaluate higher education and to reassure the girls for risking time and their father’s money. The speeches endorsed the happy camaraderie fostered in colleges. They were grateful for the change from home atmosphere and admiring of the development of quick social contacts as well as quick muscular reflexes, durability, stamina, and competitiveness. But above all, they reiterated what everyone well knows: that no desirable job can be procured without a certificate of exposure to this camaraderie and competition.

One quite famous lady spoke about the advantages of a higher education in procuring a firstclass husband — but warned against gloating once the end in view had been achieved, particularly to the object of the effort. In the event of a secondclass husband, she advised tact. I am not quoting verbatim, but the gist of the argument was exactly that. Another more ambitious alumna emphasized the help to a business career, one’s own or one’s husband’s — but also warned against gloating. A third rejoiced that cooking, upholstery, and flower arrangement had taken their rightful place in man’s world and stood at last in equal dignity beside letters and science. It struck me with force that she gloated. They all had a good word for children — the continuance of.

I think, however, these speakers missed the point. The primary concern of colleges is surely neither husband nor children, which are biological and social functions likely to continue to occupy us without help from academicians.

A college should not be considered chiefly a marriage bureau, nor an employment agency, nor a social club, nor an arena; no, nor yet a technical school for crafts and skills; and if we force the faculties to think of universities primarily in these terms, we are perpetrating a perversion, and a very grave one. It seems to me in our present world a college is the one place where standards are considered and not prices, the one place that is not a market. Everywhere else for the rest of our lives we will be called on to justify ourselves and render account. Here we only recognize.

Here it gains us nothing to say a thing is sound if it is not. We can have the joy of thinking for the intoxication of thinking and for no other purpose — not because, for instance, it will enable us to buy a more expensive dinner. Here we can ask, “Is this true?" without the withering caution as to what might or might not accrue to the answer. We can say, “This is beautiful — my heart t urns to it,” in pure love. Pure love is rare. At this one time our minds are tuned to the grand scale, to absolute pitch. It is this scale and this pitch we try to recall in our later confusions.

The questions asked during these years are fundamental questions and the answers given are classic — that is, they are enduring and passionate. And the people who dedicate their lives to helping us ask and answer are set apart from others. I don’t mean to imply that they are immune to human weakness and that campuses are unlike any other hotheds of intrigue, jealousy, and frustration. But in certain senses academic teachers are different from and better than other workers. The stuff of their trade is a cut above most, for they deal in immortality.

Furthermore, teachers exist and work not wholly for themselves, but in large part for others; and they seldom have axes to grind. They ask only attention. They ask this, and they ask that the student do the best he can with no thought of immediate profit. It seems little enough, but in actuality it is very much. It will not be demanded again of us in a hurry. This is the point of view of the artist and of the pure scientist, of the true scholar and of the true friend. This is an important moral experience and one which we certainly cannot afford to miss.

Now, then, you will probably wonder, can we not come by this experience through reading or looking at plays or TV or by taking correspondence courses? And it is true, exceptional people can. Some geniuses have done very well without education, even without books. But for most of us education is a matter of inspiration. Inspire—“to breathe in.” It is a personal experience and it occurs between living minds. Books certainly influence greatly, but few shape lives. I believe teachers do. If family and family conditions determine our essence, the jelly or brew of our character, then the matter is quickened to life by the first encounter with an awakening mind. It is no accident that organic physical life (beyond the stage of the single-cell protozoa) starts with two and with contact. The transfer of spiritual or vital force is no less magic than the infusion of physical life. Men have always known this. It has to do with secret unwritten rites, with relayed formulas, ceremonies by rote, the laying on of hands, the investiture, the Word — “In the beginning was the Word.”

All of us remember at least one great teacher. The first one I remember was a dancer, Vera Fredowa. She taught me the meaning of work, the meaning of dedication and sacrifice. She taught me discipline. How often during my life have I turned back and back to the cleansing comfort of technique!

My second great fortune was Lily Bess Campbell, professor of English literature at the University of California in Los Angeles. She taught me to think exactly, to say the precise truth as nearly as I could perceive it. She taught me that there is vitality in logic, that there is logic in humor and in beauty, that in humor the greater the truth the funnier, that in lyricism the more consistent and clear the more moving. She made me brief a Shelley ode as though it were a legal argument. She taught me that a sentence was organic with bones and sinews and for this reason had life, that the power of logic was a passionate power and that Euclid and Grammar were one. And for the first time I recognized Pattern, which is Law as well as Magic.

The third great teacher was Alfred Longueil, also of U.C.L.A. He taught me to read, and he taught me to listen. “Do you hear the sounds of words?” he asked. “Do you hear the sounds behind and before the words? Do you hear Window, Pavement, Water? Do you hear the language and the ways of living that made these words? ” He read us Milton’s prose, the letters of Keats, the narrative poems of Shakespeare. The deaf heard; the blind saw. He gave mo my heritage — my native tongue.

And then finally there was Dean Charles Reiber, who taught comparative religion and philosophy. He was a pupil of William James and he cast such a spell over his enormous classes that they used to applaud him as though they were in a theater. He taught me to ask questions. I remember sitting after the class, unmoving in my seat, shaken, almost stunned with the new and piercing sensation of asking great questions.

And there were others sitting there shaken too. Down ahead in the B’s — I was, of course, an M — sat a good-looking basketball player. He seemed to be asking himself some very hard questions. We were proud of him because he was our star player. His name was Ralph Bunche.

Years later I was having dinner at the Lafayette Hotel in New York City, when who should walk by on the street outside but Dr. Reiber! Older now and stooped, but unmistakably and most joyously he!

I jumped out of the window — it was a long French one and stood half open in the summer twilight—and stopped in front of him on the pavement.

“You don’t remember me,” I said, “but I want to thank you for changing my life.”

“I remember you,” he answered. “You’re the girl whose expression I couldn’t reply to. Come, let’s continue the discussion.”

I squared it with my escort.

2

IT is sad and frightening to think how few people in our culture believe in what they are doing. There are of course exceptions in every group, but truly most laborers, white-collar workers, domestics, and craftsmen pursue their calling for indirect benefits. Pride of craft has all but disappeared under the extreme exigencies of competition and union curbings. What most have their eye on is not achievement but the Florida vacation and the new car. Work for its own good sake brings joy to only a few dedicated groups, and of these it is the priests and the teachers who persevere undauntedly without financial ambition or financial hope. Do not underestimate the value of this point of view. A community that gives its time to working at what brings little joy loses zest and self-respect and can be teased into any kind of foolishness. Our incorruptibles are our hold on sanity.

Teachers teach because they like the life and because they believe in what they are doing. And what do we pay them for these unique offices? Less, of course, than we pay anyone else of comparable ability. Now, although they seem willing enough to work without recompense, it is manifestly not only unfair but risky to ask them to continue doing so, however idealistic they may profess themselves. They have families, and with all the high-mindedness in the world they cannot curtail their children’s comfort and security. The old adage, “If you can, you do. if you can’t, you teach, is not a true one. The kind of mind and point of view and discipline that makes a great pedagogue can be well used in commercial fields. Our finest practitioners in a special and difficult art will be tempted away, and once our faculties diminish in quality, the student will follow suit immediately. And that will be the end of us.

Last winter I was engaged in staging a particularly dispiriting show, and in a mournful rehearsal in Philadelphia I read to my dancers what Joseph Conrad had to say about the art of seamanship, and they took heart and went back to the breach. Conrad was speaking of sailors but the words are applicable equally to dancers or to teachers. If I were a teacher I would say this to my students — and as a student, I would say this to all teachers: “. . . the moral side of an industry, productive or unproductive, the redeeming and ideal aspect of this bread-winning, is the attainment and preservation of the highest possible skill on the part of the craftsmen. Such skill, the skill of technique, is more than honesty; it is something wider, embracing honesty and grace and rule in an elevated and clear sentiment, not altogether utilitarian, which may be called the honor of labor. It is made up of accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it is spurred on and sustained by discriminating praise . . . the sort of understanding I mean depends so much on love; and love, though in a sense it may be admitted to be stronger than death, is by no means so universal and so sure. In fact, love is rare — the love of men, of things, of ideas, the love of perfected skill. For love is the enemy of haste; it takes count of passing days, of men who pass away, of a fine art matured slowly in the course of years and doomed in a short time to pass away, too, and be no more. . .”

And I say to you that one of the things that may pass away is integrity, the valor of pure thinking, the standards that are set by poets and saints and not by sales records and agents.

Remember that free thought has always been kept alive by students in cloister or university, that the university is always the first line of battle. Remember that Hitler hit the universities first and destroyed their freedom. And until he had done this, he could do little else; and once he had done this, all else he accomplished followed as a matter of course. It was the universities in Poland that gave first evidence of the breach within the state as it was the Polish university faculties that were murdered first. Bear in mind the gallant and, most important, the effective stand taken by the faculties of the University of California in the matter of the Regents Oath and by the president and faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in the question of free speech and American Legion strictures — and be grateful for their enlightened courage. Remember always most solemnly that the person who determines your way of living and your chance of salvation is not the man who pays your wages, nor your president, nor your doctor or policeman, nor yet even your spouse, but the one who looks you in the face when you are young, calls you by your true name, and says, “Go forth.”