Unbound

Last night, I took a break from dissertating to take a class at Harvard, from my very comfy seat here in my basement study.

In a true stroke of genius and technological wizardry, my Alma Mater has made available to alumni, free of charge, online access to the understandably famous undergraduate class by Prof. Michael J. Sandel, titled "Justice."

Facing hundreds of students at the dark and medieval Sanders Theater, Prof. Sandel looked more like an actor delivering a Shakespearean soliloquy than a professor trying to keep his students awake. And he had no trouble doing that.

Cameras panned through his audience, who was riveted and spellbound by Prof. Sandel's engaging teaching style and commanding presence (Oh, what a good suit and tie will do for a man, too!). Plus, they were taking frantic notes, which is always a good sign.

I also was spellbound and taking notes. And not just notes about what he was saying but how he was saying it. That's because I could imagine myself sometime in the future delivering a lecture like that (although at my college on the hill I'll likely never have more than 30 or 40 students in a lecture). But the art of lecturing to an overflowing auditorium is one I saw in action many times at Harvard, and one which I would like to try my hand at sometime in the future.

Listening to Prof. Sandel for about 30 minutes, I learned about consequential and categorical moral philosophy and about the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's belief in "the restlessness of reason." In explaining to the students the style and purpose of his course, Prof. Sandel inadvertently explained to me the political philosophy that undergirds my own teaching.

I'm not saying I'm at the level of Prof. Sandel by any stretch of the imagination. And that's totally cool with me. I know I have miles to go before I sleep on my laurels and I like that feeling. I don't ever want to feel arrived. I always want to be in mental motion, learning, changing, being challenged and stretched beyond my boundaries and capabilities.

I inherit not only the love of teaching but that unquenchable thirst for knowledge and that appreciation for being an eternal student from my parents. My father reads book after book after book every day of his life and my mother is also always reading and surfing the web and finding new things she wants to learn about and do.

Like Sandel, I believe that education (although he was referring to political philosophy in particular) should be an "exercise in self-knowledge" and one that "unsettles us." I also agree with Prof. Sandel that once we've been unsettled by knowledge, we can never go back to the moment of innocence, we can never unknow what we know.

Frederick Douglass said it best when he noted how he sometimes felt that learning to read "had been a curse rather than a blessing." For Douglass, reading:

had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit [of slavery], but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

That's exactly how unsettling learning should be, it should give us all an irreversible taste of what freedom of the mind feels like. This thirst for freedom in thought (and, consequentially, in body as well) should be, to paraphrase Douglass, something that looks at us from every star and smiles at us in every calm; something that we feel breathing in every wind and moving in every storm.

Way back when I was a rookie at this I started my teaching philosophy by stating that "I teach freedom in my classroom." Snickering a bit unkindly, my graduate professor told me to take that out because it could be misinterpreted politically since "freedom" has so many connotations and denotations in U.S. culture. I did as she suggested but the feeling behind the statement remains fundamentally true.

Like Prof. Sandel, I set out to rock my students' world, to give them the tools to unbind their minds from any shackles that may keep them bound. But I also seek to rock my own world through them, through what my students learn and teach me in the process.

I can't wait to be unsettled and unbound and to have the map of my world expanded in the coming weeks as I sit in this chair and watch Prof. Sandel ignite the hearts and minds of his students, including mine.