This is an unusual book in these times. There is something old-fashioned about it. Written by two long-time teachers, whose experience includes secondary as well as higher education, it reveals a noble conception of the teacher's role. Rather than technical--it really doesn't contain much about how to teach and is the furthest thing from a collection of "ideas that work"--it is humanistic. That term, reduced in recent theoretical approaches to some sort of denigration, deserves to be an honorific and, when applied to Banner and Cannon's book, it is.

Each chapter after the introduction is devoted to one of the elements of teaching--for instance, Learning, Authority, Ethics, Order--and contains a sort of anatomy of the subordinate elements followed by a vignette of a teacher who illustrates (or, less often, illustrates the converse of) the paricular trait. The chapter on Learning--and it is characteristic of these authors' thinking that the teacher's learning is the first attainment they address--includes such explanatory statements as Learning means knowing and mastering a subject, Learning conveys the spirit and love of learning to others, and Learning means being open to the knowledge of others, especially of one's students.

I can best convey the flavor of this book by quoting some of the observations which struck me:

Behind all good teaching, though rarely acknowledged, lies all teachers' ambition for all students they have ever taught--that their students be more knowledgeable, more open to life, more understanding of the world than when they first entered the teachers' classrooms.

Compassion in teaching is therefore not simply affection; it is an emotional reaction to the ignorance of the young, which creates in teachers a desire to wrestle with ignorance, substitute knowledge, and establish order and certainty wherever students' intellectual chaos and doubt are evident

Teaching is also the gift of one person to another. It is a compassionate extension of self in acknowledgement of the needs and aspirations of someone else, usually but not always younger than we are and always, for a time at least, dependent on us for some kind of knowledge. In that gift of self consists teaching's greatest satisfaction--the giving not so much of knowledge, which each person must acquire, as of habits of mind and heart and powers of thought.

I began by saying that there is something old-fashioned in this book. Suggestions that students begin in intellectual chaos, that teachers may give knowledge to students, or that teachers must operate from a position of subject-matter mastery will trouble some readers. Nevertheless there is something humane and noble about the things these two career teachers believe, and write, about our profession.

I can imagine several uses for this book. One would be to help inspire and motivate a young teacher, possibly unsure of her vocation; another would be to inspire and reassure a more established teacher who might have begun to question the dignity and worth of his calling. The authors also suggest, sensibly enough, that trustees, governing boards, and opinion-formers could usefully read the book and thereby form a higher opinion of the teaching profession than many of them now hold. It is, of course, unlikely that very many will do this.

But those who do read this little book will discover a powerful case for the authors' claim that teaching is "among life's noblest and most responsible activities."

Merritt Moseley,
UNC Asheville