Education: The Rewards of Teaching

Higher pay is one way to get more teachers. Another: spreading the truth that a teacher’s bread is not dough alone. Last week the American Council on Education issued a warm little pamphlet (College Teaching As a Career) that allows three noted U.S. teachers to recruit in their own way—by describing the rich satisfactions they find in their work. Teaching rewards:

Happiness. Says famed Teacher Mark Van Doren of Columbia University: “The college teacher is devoted to the search for truth, and as such he is the envy of all those in our society who are paid to obscure or distort it. He is the only one who is paid to be as honest, as simple, and as serious as he can . . . The work is indeed hard, as it must be since its purpose is to transform a child into a man; but there is no work that makes so happy those who do it well . . . The best teacher is willing to be forgotten. His only reassurance needs to be the faith that somehow his efforts have increased the amount of mind in a world which can never have too much of that commodity . . . His final reward is the quality of his life, which teaching has helped to shape.”

Discovery. Says Chemist Reuben G. Gustavson, former chancellor of the University of Nebraska: “Twenty-eight years of teaching [college] science gave me the most fun I have ever had. It is fun to help students discover facts and laws unknown to them. [But] it does not take long before student and teacher have walked together out to the frontier of knowledge—a fine comradeship between an older and a younger generation. Each new generation of young scientists gets its happiness by explaining what was inscrutable to the previous generation.”

Freedom. Says Philosopher T. V. Smith of Syracuse University: “I all but missed this professional career, and I shudder to think how close I came to that misfortune . . . We are as little as possible engaged in the power struggle. Our profession has managed to make of arduous work a pleasure by transmuting pressures into power-with, rather than power-over, others . . . Only those who know the military or have experienced the industrial form of organization will fully appreciate how lucky is our academic lot … It is good, how good, to share the unearned increments of joy arising from continuous collaboration of youth and age.”

For skeptics among the 175,000 U.S. undergraduates to whom the pamphlet is being distributed, the council notes such material teaching pleasures as a nine-month schedule, the sabbatical year. Other advantages now prevalent (at little or no cost): housing, medical and life insurance, pensions, mutual-fund stocks, education for faculty children. Average starting pay is still small (about $5,500 last year), but, since 1954, faculty salaries have risen about 7% a year.