David Sweet—Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, History

For me the purpose of teaching, the purpose of life itself, is subversion. Its main method is kindness, or the practice of love. Good teaching, like good living, is a subversive practice of love.

Students, like the rest of us today, seem to me to live ensnared to a frightening degree by the lies and distractions wrought by a system that is obsessed with wealth and violence and is careless of human dignity, a system that renders us all weak in the face of power. Some students, fortunate in family or early schooling, come to us already quite strong and knowledgeable, even wise. Most, when we meet them, are still poorly equipped to fend for themselves in this world. All live surrounded by a terrible disorientation.

As teachers our job is to help students come to understand what they are up against, and help them little by little to find strength and skill and determination in themselves, both individually and collectively. That (whether they end up seeing the world as I do or not) is what will enable them to insist on trying to be their own best selves always. To stand tall, to inform themselves efficiently, to think clearly, to communicate their thoughts effectively, to work as closely as possible with others. Thus equipped, they will practice love in their own ways and thereby contribute over the long run what each of them can to the hard, often lonely work of subverting anything that holds people down.

Teaching is work that we can do best by example-as we contrive to speak our own truths to wealth and violence and to demonstrate in practice our respect for human dignity in the face of power, both in the classroom and beyond. By so doing, in small but incremental ways, we can help students find their own techniques for dissolving or negating power, which is the most subversive practice of all.

Subversion is daunting; to help people find the strength for it is to set a high standard and then both to strive through one's own work, and invite students to strive through their work, to achieve it. At the same time, a subversive teacher has got to deal kindly and encouragingly with those who can't yet do (or even refuse to do!) what is being asked of them. All teachers presumably do both of these things to some degree. But most of us don't do them as well as we might because we too are trapped in the false values of wealth and power. So we practice love only stumblingly and sporadically.

Each of us is handicapped, moreover, by having to work alone for the most part. We are obliged to devise our own never fully adequate ways of going about this life's work of ours. The limits to our collective capacity for subversion are nowhere more evident than in the fact that we rarely talk with one another in a serious way about teaching. A really subversive pedagogy would be a collective endeavor with an agreed-upon overall purpose, whatever the differences in content and method between us as teachers. It would involve a continuous consultation about our teaching, and about the progress of particular students, along the way. That, sadly, has escaped us; and our students are much the weaker for it.

History teaching can be subversive in its own particularly exciting ways, and for that reason it has always seemed to me to be exceptionally important work, a sacred calling. I see it as an exhilarating opportunity to help build little bridges of human solidarity between individual people alive here and now and people living in far away times and places. Students who get into the habit of walking back and forth across those bridges through their day-by-day reading, listening, discussion, and writing come to understand that human experience is a great deal broader and more interesting, quirkier and more surprising, less disheartening, and above all more inspiring and invigorating than it is sometimes cracked up to be-or than anybody's "past politics" or "one damned thing after another" can ever be. They can even come in time to "identify" wholeheartedly with the whole human race. In that understanding and identification, it seems to me, lies much of the strength that we all need for the ongoing work of subversion.

The subversive approach to teaching I have taken is labor-intensive and in practice can make it a full-time job. It is, frankly, hard to square with an "academic career;" and it is hard to sustain in a research university that in the end is concerned less with teaching than with scholarship, less with subversion than with the reproduction of the labor force. People with better time-management skills than mine sometimes seem to flourish and accomplish a great deal in both endeavors. They have earned my deep admiration. For me, the commitment to teaching (and to citizenship) has made of scholarship a favorite hobby, all too seldom indulged in the course of a busy life. The university has often enough been cross with me for making these choices; thankfully, it has not denied me the freedom to make them, or sent me packing.

For a teacher to insist on human dignity in the face of power, past or present, is to resist everything that massifies. It is to "honor labor," to celebrate life, to listen carefully to people alive and dead. It is to learn students' names, to take their work seriously as work and respond to it, as a means of encouraging them to take that work seriously themselves. It is to talk with them one on one and establish a semblance of individual human relationship with each, insofar as they will allow it, and to learn something about their particular circumstances, problems, and aspirations. It is to encourage them to work in groups and, when they are ready, to strike out boldly. It is to keep an eye out for those who are stumbling or fading away and to lend the helping hand in timely fashion wherever it's humanly possible. It is to evaluate their efforts and their accomplishments constructively and conscientiously, and not simply to "grade" them.

It is also worthwhile and deeply satisfying work; and I count myself privileged to have been allowed it during three decades in this extraordinary time and place.