The Uncertain Profession

by Oliver Gibson

I have a book called The Uncertain Profession. The title refers to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, but it could very well be the school here at UB. In the book is L.O. Cummings, who was the first dean of UB's Graduate School of Education and started the first program in school administration here.

As an institutional observation, I would say that the School of Education has had a great, great difficulty figuring out what it's up to. That continues to be the case.

From time to time, people undertake the process of clarifying the objectives of the school. That's part of a broader divide in the field of education. There are two sides to it.

One side is that a person should be subjected to stimuli from a number of other people to learn facts, such as what you need to know about math, or what you need to know about history. The State of New York goes through spasms of concern that teachers won't know enough to apply the stimuli to kids.

I have yet to find a student who later on talks about his professor because of what he knew. Practically always, the memorable teacher is memorable not intellectually so much as emotionally. Students feel it's a person who has confidence in them and arouses confidence in themselves.

That, I think, is what education needs to get a grasp of: the fact that people aren't all brain.

During my undergraduate study at Mount Allison in New Brunswick, Canada, I ran across someone who was memorable for his approach to teaching. He was Professor Gustav Heubner, who had been a student of Husserl (noted for starting the school of phenomenology) at the University of Berlin. He had also been a student of Henri Bergsson.

Professor Heubner had a very direct and unpretentious approach to life. I guess he simply assumed that human beings have an awareness that they can do something with. I still recall with great clarity the sessions that he led. He had - at least for me - a kind of magnetism that is unusual.