I planned for today's post to be the second part of what I started yesterday, but I came across a quote today that I felt compelled to share.
Seneca was a first century Roman philosopher who is known to us by his essays, plays, and copious letters. I'm currently reading through some of his 124 published letters as I research the relationship between precepts and examples, and this morning I read a short letter (Ep. 6) written to a friend who had requested Seneca to share some of the things he had been reading. "Give me also a share in these gifts which you have found so helpful," his friend implores. Your life is changing for the better, in other words, and I want to join you.
Seneca responds in his letter that he is anxious to "heap these privileges upon you" because:
"I am glad to learn in order that I might teach. Nothing will ever please me, no matter how excellent or beneficial, if I must retain the knowledge of it to myself. And if wisdom were given me under the express condition that it must be kept hidden and not uttered, I should refuse it. No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it."
As someone who aspires to teach for a living (or better yet, who feels called to teaching as a vocation), I resonated with Seneca's words.
He's not advocating, I'm confident, a type of utilitarian learning in which I learn only so that I have something to teach. (Preachers know this temptation: I study scripture only so that I have something to preach.) Seneca's writings clearly reveal that he loves learning; it is a great joy for him, but he doesn't want to keep that joy to himself. He wants to share it. Only then will the joy of learning fully bloom.
Seneca's attitude also protects him from the insidious elitism that can easily ensnare professional learners. If knowledge is power, as some have said, then we must beware of the temptation to hoard that power in an attempt to inflate the self. In this way, teaching is self-denying. I share freely (or for the modest price of tuition) what otherwise I could keep to myself. I heap on others the privileges which I could otherwise greedily amass for myself. I take the knowledge that would make me unique or special if I kept it to myself, and I give it to others. And I don't do so begrudgingly: I do so anxiously because no good thing is pleasant to possess without friends to share it.
Teaching is sharing. Teaching is selfless generosity. At its best, teaching heals the learner from a dropsy of the intellect: rather than greedily swelling with retained knowledge, the teacher denies his claim to the knowledge, releases it, and experiences the joy and freedom of sharing. In this way, teaching is a cross-shaped activity.
(Or course, the immediate gratification of students' adulation can lead teachers into another trap of self-aggrandizement, but I'll leave that subject for another day.)
So, when I read Seneca's words this morning, I couldn't keep them to myself. I've been blessed with the time to read Seneca, and I'm anxious to share his wisdom with you.
(The icon of Christ the Teacher)
As I prepare for next semester, in which I will teach four classes in lecture halls filled with about fifty students, I am encouraged by the advice of the first century rhetorician and educator, Quintilian. He offers an apology for public education to those who would prefer to hire private tutors for their children, claiming that in some subjects there is no limit to the number of students who can each receive the full value of their teacher's instruction. He explains with the somewhat self-aggrandizing metaphor:
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