The Teacher Within
Encounters with mentors and subjects can awaken a sense of self and yield clues
to who we are. But the call to teach does not come from external encounters
alone—no outward teacher or teaching will have much effect until my soul as-
sents. Any authentic call ultimately comes from the voice of the teacher within, the
voice that invites me to honor the nature of my true self.
By the voice of the inward teacher, I do not mean conscience or superego, moral ar-
biter or internalized judge. In fact, conscience, as it is commonly understood, can
get us into deep vocational trouble.
When we listen primarily for what we “ought” to be doing with our lives, we may
find ourselves hounded by external expectations that can distort our identity and
integrity. There is much that I ought to be doing by some abstract moral calculus.
But is it my vocation? Am I gifted and called to do it? Is this particular ought a
place of intersection between my inner self and the outer world, or is it someone
else's image of how my life should look?
When I follow only the oughts, I may find myself doing work that is ethically laud-
able but not mine to do. A vocation that is not mine, no matter how externally val-
ued, does violence to the self—in the precise sense that it violates my identity and
integrity on behalf of some abstract norm. When I violate myself, I invariably end
up violating the people I work with. How many teachers inflict their own pain on
their students, the pain that comes from doing what never was, or no longer is,
their true work?
In contrast to the strained and even violent concept of vocation as an ought, Fred-
erick Buechner offers a more generous and humane image of vocation as “the
place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”11
In a culture that sometimes equates work with suffering, it is revolutionary to sug-
gest that the best inward sign of vocation is deep gladness—revolutionary but
true. If a work is mine to do, it will make me glad over the long haul, despite the
difficult days. Even the difficult days will ultimately gladden me, because they pose
the kinds of problems that can help me grow in a work if it is truly mine.
If a work does not gladden me in these ways, I need to consider laying it down.
When I devote myself to something that does not flow from my identity, that is
not integral to my nature, I am most likely deepening the world's hunger rather
than helping to alleviate it.
There are times when we must work for money rather than meaning, and we may
never have the luxury of quitting a job because it does not make us glad. But that
does not release us from continually checking the violence we do to others and
ourselves by working in ways that violate our souls. Nor does it relieve us from
wondering whether preserving integrity is a luxury. What brings more security in
the long run: holding this job or honoring my soul?
The teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It
speaks not of what ought to be but of what is real for us, of what is true. It says
things like, “This is what fits you and this is what doesn't”; “This is who you are
and this is who you are not”; “This is what gives you life and this is what kills your
spirit—or makes you wish you were dead.” The teacher within stands guard at the
gate of selfhood, warding off whatever insults our integrity and welcoming what-
ever affirms it. The voice of the inward teacher reminds me of my truth as I nego-
tiate the force field of my life.
I realize that the idea of a teacher within strikes some academics as a romantic
fantasy, but I cannot fathom why. If there is no such reality in our lives, centuries
of Western discourse about the aims of education become so much lip-flapping.
In classical understanding, education is the attempt to “lead out” from within the
self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of
truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination. The
inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any
education worthy of the name.
Perhaps the idea is unpopular because it compels us to look at two of the most
difficult truths about teaching. The first is that what we teach will never “take” un-
less it connects with the inward, living core of our students' lives, with our stu-
dents' inward teachers.
We can, and do, make education an exclusively outward enterprise, forcing stu-
dents to memorize and repeat facts without ever appealing to their inner truth—
and we get predictable results: many students never want to read a challenging
book or think a creative thought once they get out of school. The kind of teaching
that transforms people does not happen if the student's inward teacher is ignored.
The second truth is even more daunting: we can speak to the teacher within our
students only when we are on speaking terms with the teacher within ourselves.
The student who said that her bad teachers spoke like cartoon characters was de-
scribing teachers who have grown deaf to their inner guide, who have so thor-
oughly separated inner truth from outer actions that they have lost touch with a
sense of self. Deep speaks to deep, and when we have not sounded our own
depths, we cannot sound the depths of our students' lives.
How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? I have no particular meth-
ods to suggest, other than the familiar ones: solitude and silence, meditative read-
ing and walking in the woods, keeping a journal, finding a friend who will listen. I
simply propose that we need to learn as many ways as we can of “talking to our-
selves.”
That phrase, of course, is one we normally use to name a symptom of mental
imbalance—a clear sign of how our culture regards the idea of an inner voice! But
people who learn to talk to themselves may soon delight in the discovery that the
teacher within is the sanest conversation partner they have ever had.
We need to find every possible way to listen to that voice and take its counsel seri-
ously, not only for the sake of our work but for the sake of our own health as well.
If someone in the outer world is trying to tell us something important and we ig-
nore his or her presence, the person either gives up and stops speaking or be-
comes more and more violent in attempting to get our attention.
Similarly, if we do not respond to the voice of the inward teacher, it will either stop
speaking or become violent: I am convinced that some forms of depression, of
which I have personal experience, are induced by a long-ignored inner teacher try-
ing desperately to get us to listen by threatening to destroy us. When we honor
that voice with simple attention, it responds by speaking more gently and engag-
ing us in a life-giving conversation of the soul.
That conversation does not have to reach conclusions to be of value: we do not
need to emerge from talking to ourselves with clear goals, objectives, and plans.
Measuring the value of inner dialogue by its practical outcomes is like measuring
the value of a friendship by the number of problems that are solved when friends
get together.
Conversation among friends has its own rewards: in the presence of our friends,
we have the simple joy of feeling at ease, at home, trusted and able to trust. We at-
tend to the inner teacher not to get fixed but to befriend the deeper self, to culti-
vate a sense of identity and integrity that allows us to feel at home wherever we
are.
Listening to the inner teacher also offers an answer to one of the most basic ques-
tions teachers face: How can I develop the authority to teach, the capacity to stand
my ground in the midst of the complex forces of both the classroom and my own
life?
In a culture of technique, we often confuse authority with power, but the two are
not the same. Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the in-
side out. We are mistaken when we seek authority outside ourselves, in sources
ranging from the subtle skills of group process to that less than subtle method of
social control called grading. This view of teaching turns the teacher into the cop
on the corner, trying to keep things moving amicably and by consent but always
having recourse to the coercive power of the law.
External tools of power have occasional utility in teaching, but they are no substi-
tute for authority, the authority that comes from the teacher's inner life. The clue
is in the word itself, which has author at its core. Authority is granted to people
who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives,
rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When
teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no author-
ity at all.
I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose touch with my
inner teacher and therefore with my own authority. In those times I try to gain
power by barricading myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the
threat of grades. But when my teaching is authorized by the teacher within me, I
need neither weapons nor armor to teach.
Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, re-membering my selfhood
and my sense of vocation. Then teaching can come from the depths of my own
truth—and the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind.
Notes
1. May Sarton, in “Now I Become Myself,” Collected Poems, 1930–1973 (New
York: Norton, 1974), p. 156. Copyright © 1993, 1988, 1984, 1947 by May Sar-
ton. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with
Truth (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Press, 1927).
3. Cited in Earl Schwartz, “Chronic Life,” Creative Nursing, Feb. 1992, p. 58.
4. Václav Havel, speech delivered to joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, quoted
in Time, Mar. 5, 1990, pp. 14–15.
5. Alice Kaplan, French Lessons: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), p. 209.
6. Kaplan, French Lessons, pp. 210–211.
7. Ibid., p. 216.
8. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1959).
9. Jane Tompkins, “Pedagogy of the Distressed,” College English, 1991, 52(6).
10. Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days (New York: Penguin Books,
1983), p. 42.
11. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), p. 119.
