A book about great teachers—by George Steiner? One’s eyes narrow suspiciously. But no, he is in chastened mood. “Why have I been remunerated,” he asks, “for what is my oxygen and raison d’être?” Tactfully he avoids answering that question, evoking instead his weekly seminars at Geneva, where he and his students (now dispersed “on five continents”) would study Phaedrus or The Tempest and he would “introduce (falteringly) The Brothers Karamazov.” The university teacher, heir of Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha, thus enjoys “touches of grace and hope.” Why, he later concedes, “even at a humble level—that of the schoolmaster—to teach, to teach well, is to be accomplice to transcendent possibility”: for who knows whether that solemn little boy in the back row might not turn out to be a budding George Steiner?

Speaking as someone who has operated “at a humble level” for as long as Steiner was in Geneva, I may tell him that I, too, have taught Phaedrus and The Tempest—and the passage from Proust on the death of Bergotte which he also mentions. Not Karamazov, admittedly, but one can only do so much at a humble level. Even so, I cheer myself with the reflection that my students would not, as he does, believe Plato’s Socrates as a character to be “comparable if not superior to” Falstaff, Hamlet, or Anna Karenina, or claim that the Platonic dialogues are “as intricately plotted as Henry James’s,” or think that Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is a novel to admire. In the customarily wide range of Steiner’s survey, one figure eludes him. Shakespeare is silent, he thinks, about the master/disciple relationship. (He forgets, apparently, Falstaff’s role as a kind of parodic Socrates to Prince Hal.) Of course, as Steiner says, Shakespeare was suspicious of academic authority; he never attended a university seminar, and had Hamlet gone to Geneva rather than Wittenberg he might have been spared much perplexity.

Amid the pomposity, portentousness, and vacuousness of Steiner’s prose—”the sweat of a monument” as James Wood brilliantly describes it in his lethal essay on Steiner in The Broken Estate—some important points struggle for survival. Yes, a great teacher does have a quasi-seductive appeal to the intellect. Yes, a great teacher is ultimately lonely, because if he has been successful his pupils can do without him (think of the moving evaporation of Virgil from the Divine Comedy). Wittgenstein has a penetrating passage in Culture and Value:

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is how it is with me; I have sometimes thought so.

It was also true, I should say, of Leavis, who is often linked with Wittgenstein as a great twentieth-century teacher. And yes, the influence of great teaching is incommunicable; the dicta of Nadia Boulanger, one of the few women in a book whose title and incidental usages largely confine pedagogic greatness to males, are colorless, but it was her charisma, her physical presence, that mattered.

This is why Steiner’s remarks about computer technology are as wrong as they could well be:

The screen can teach, examine, demonstrate, interact with a precision, a clarity, and a patience exceeding that of a human instructor. Its resources can be disseminated and enlisted at will. It knows neither prejudice nor fatigue. In turn, the apprentice can question, object, answer back in a dialectic whose pedagogic value may come to surpass that of spoken discourse.

No, no, and no again! For it is the presumed infallibility and inexhaustibility of the machine (Steiner must be able to afford much better ones than I can) which make it impossible for it to be a teacher of any kind, let alone a great one. The mutual taking of risks, the acceptance of error, the frustrations of nerve and intellect, the renewal of will, the awareness of limited time and the corresponding sense of urgency are fundamental to the learning process. Teaching is a human act grounded in a human relationship. To call a computer a teacher is to pervert the word.

Among the most telling strokes in the book are the remarks on the American education system—much of which apply in Britain, too—with its belief in what Steiner, in a rare moment of epigrammatic crystallization, calls “the rights of all to be gifted.” The ad hoc instruction of Eliot by Pound, and, less happily, of Hemingway by Gertrude Stein, ossified into “creative writing” classes. “What would “non-creative writing’ be?” Steiner wonders, forgetting that the answer lies all around him in the products of those same classes.

He is on stronger ground in deploring the “travesty of responsible argument and scholarship” represented by “Pseudo-curricula” which “have been institutionalized at the price of indispensable disciplines.” A longer quotation shows him writing with unusual force and clarity:

The point is that for better or worse . . . our heritage in the west is that of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. The alphabet of our recognitions is that developed by “dead white males.” Our literary, philosophical, aesthetic touchstones are those of a European or North American core, often vividly influenced from outside and now qualified and enriched by ethnic plurality. To regard Sophocles or Dante or Shakespeare as somehow tainted by imperialist, colonialist mentality is idiocy pure and simple. To discard western poetry or the novel from Cervantes to Proust as “male chauvinistic” is blindness.

Amen to that, and he puts the blame precisely where it ought to be, on the university teachers who have abdicated their function at the behest of politically motivated minority pressure groups who have maneuvered themselves into positions of financial and administrative power. He adds, though perhaps more confidently than the circumstances warrant, “The Sciences know no such folly,” inhabiting a world where “The correctness is that of the equation, not the politics of cowardice.” Yet the sciences too are humane disciplines, and we can all think of cases in which research funds have been deployed to promote some politically expedient but morally dubious cause.

As suggested above, the British system is in comparable disarray. The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, has expressed open contempt for universities that wish to retain teachers of philosophy or medieval history (while conceding that a few museum specimens might be allowed to remain for the amusement of the public). Teachers at all levels, from reception class to postgraduate seminar, are hamstrung by a curriculum that demands that the maximum number of students be catered for at the minimum cost, and that hates ambition, excellence, vision, or originality. The possibility, not just of great teaching, but of adequate teaching, is menaced, for the liberties which are its lifeblood are denied. Steiner quotes a Harvard wisecrack on Jesus, “A fine teacher, but didn’t publish”; neither he nor Socrates would get tenure today. For all their absurdities and flaws, Steiner and his book reflect a noble and, one fears, a doomed heritage.