Creative Teachers: Risk, Responsibility, and Love

T heAthenian or the Spartan: over the course of western history, assessments of good teaching have tended toward the one or the other as an exemplar. Athens represents the spirit of spontaneous cultural revision, Sparta that of conservative cultural maintenance. That each side routinely gets a hearing indicates that there is some truth in each. This suggests to me that instead of residing in either extreme, the best teaching lives within the tension of these two spirits.My reflections aim to show that it is in this tension that creative or experimental teaching may arise—a teaching that at once requires the teacher’s Athenian autonomy and Spartan responsibility. Experience also seems to suggest that this creative tension requiresmediation by an abiding care and interest that allow these two opposed spirits to work together. We seem currently in the midst of a movement toward mechanical pedagogy. In educating our teachers and in administering our schools, we are tending toward a Spartan extreme. This mechanistic approach brings to mind a concern Jacques Barzun gave voice to some years ago: “Teaching is not a lost art but regard for it is a lost tradition” (Barzun 1945, p. 12). There is an artfulness, an element of creativity, in good teaching that requires teachers to be more than technicians. This is not an abstract principle but a truth found in the experience of teaching. Thus, the reflections that follow are “radi-