The remarks on the hard life of professors were written before additional hardships were visited upon them. I would refer particularly to the large growth in enrollments from culturally disparate groups and the heavy decline in respect for authority in any form. The classroom has become a torment to a great many good teachers and they are carrying their anguish into their other lives; an hour of class time today is likely to be more debilitating physically and psychologically than it was in 1957. The instructor in his classroom has become the target not only of the occasional intellectually critical student, but of all the troubled citizens of a troubled society. One is often reduced to being a warden without weapons; at best, one may become the leader of a sensitivity or encounter group. I trust that this book may help instructors to be both, while at the same time aiding them to extend their teaching into the disciplining of the mind and soul.
I think that, even though a textbook should be a coteacher, it would be well for departments and schools to arrange for most courses to be taught by two instructors, to arrange for instructing assistants or other students to share the podium, and to arrange the class in circles -- all to the end that cooperative, as against disruptive, involvement can occur and that the principal instructor be removed from the isolated position of the "sitting duck."
Our students make many claims. Freed from the incubus of respecting authority per se, they will often succumb to the feeling that their intrinsic worth is boundless and that competence is theirs by birth. The remedy for such delusions is not repressive authority but to make students responsible in some proportion to their claims. Credits and Compulsory attendance, grades, required readings tested routinely -- these may be unimportant and even unnecessary, but performance and achievement must be elicited and rewarded. If some do not "believe" in tests, then they should be permitted to evaluate themselves; let them set up in advance their own criteria for judging their progress and reporting on their personal achievements.
If someone should go into a solipsistic funk, he or she should withdraw from the class on grounds that he is already reporting his state of mind, exhibiting his way of speech, revealing his dress and appearance; he is choosing to "be there," in a class and school -- all of which affects his evaluation by others. Logically he should not play games or sports, make love, eat in the company of others, or in any other way provide evidence to others that he has progressed beyond infancy. I would make such observations in private, if they concern a given student, because we are dealing with many instances bordering upon paranoid schizophrenia. However, the general point may be made to the whole class, if necessary.
The heavy influx of guidance counselors, psychological advisers, slow-reader accelerators, and administrative warders into modern schools has hardly helped the situation here described. Appropriate connections between the influx and the instructor's arena are simply not made. The educational enterprise must still succeed or fail within the study class. The process of substantive education is inextricably therapeutic. These people of the great influx, if they are to be hired at all, should be introduced into the classroom as auxiliary teachers, laboring mid-milieu with the instructor of the discipline.
End of Instructional Guide.