Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, 33°, Grand Cross
President, The George Washington University
2121 Eye St., NW, Washington, DC 20052

On September 8, 2000, Ill. Stephen J. Trachtenberg, 33°, G.C., President, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., met with the Scottish Rite Brethren of the Valley of Alexandria, Virginia, to participate as the event's keynote speaker in that Valley's "Outstanding Teachers of the Year Award Program." Pictured above (l. to r.) at the occasion are: Bro. C. "Buddy" Wagner, 32°, K.C.C.H.; Gail V. Ritchie, Fairfax County Public Schools, Kings Park Elementary School; Ill. Walter S. Downs, 33°, G.C., Personal Representative and Secretary; Nancy Howard, Alexandria City Public Schools, George Washington Middle School; Ill. Trachtenberg; Phyllis Poindexter Gandy, Arlington Public School, Wakefield High School; and Bro. Norman L. Hoff, Jr., 32°, K.C.C.H.

Of all the honorable titles that the human race has taken seriously—warrior, healer, builder, empire-builder, wilderness-tamer—none should be more honored than teacher. Warriors and empire-builders so often leave heaps of dead bodies behind them as they rewrite the pages of history. Builders may express their enthusiasm by designing fortresses for an oppressive state. And wilderness-tamers, as all of us have learned in the past century, sometimes leave the wilderness gasping for breath and barely clinging to life after they're beaten all of the wilderness out of it!

But teacher is a title that our ancestors respected in the era of the Bible, in Greco-Roman times, in the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance, and down into the 19th and 20th centuries. It is one of the roles we find being played by the most important figures of the Bible. Teacher is the main role of such famous people in history as Socrates, Plato, Solon, the Saints Augustine, Jerome, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Descartes, Spinoza, John Locke, and Cardinal Newman. In other words, teacher is a title that combines religious intensity with the attitude often described as "parental"—a deep concern for the inner life and the moral condition of one's student.

When I run my own mind over the great teachers of my life, they certainly come in an odd assortment of packages. There was the teacher in my elementary school wood shop who, when I held up my project and said, "It broke!" responded: "Trachtenberg, It didn't break. YOU broke it!" I learned something about personal responsibility that day.

There were teachers at Columbia College in the 1950s who seemed, in some mysterious way, to summarize what teaching is all about. One of them, teaching a course titled "Art Humanities," would flash on the screen at the front of the class a slide of a Doric Temple or of El Greco's "Burial of Count Orgaz." Then, after pointing to one or two salient details, he would single out one student in the class and ask: "What about that, Mr. Shmidlapp?" Poor Shmidlapp, the college sophomore, would then struggle to explain that the spaces between the Doric pillars were as shapely as the pillars themselves or that the soul of Count Orgaz, as it moved up toward heaven, was like a baby being born. And while the student struggled to become impressive at the college level, the teacher would benevolently nod—which was his way of being an effective instructor.

And then there was Jim Shenton, Professor of American History, whose performance as a lecturer got rave reviews and at least a dozen stars from the students themselves. Jim, whose work as a lecturer has now been made nationally famous by The Teaching Company, would get on stage in front of a packed room of students, and he would do more than tell us about the past. He would recreate it.

Jim Shenton disproved all the clichés about teaching, especially those which described "the teacher" as someone always struggling against the superior competitiveness of the movies and TV. Jim Shenton's classes were more exciting than any entertainment. For one thing, Jim Shenton's lectures weren't rehearsed. They flowed into our ears as if they were the fruit of that moment's inspiration. You watched Jim at work, and you knew he was circling around some very lofty challenge—a living and plausible description of William Jennings Bryan or Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson or Calvin Coolidge. He always came up with something much more vigorous and revealing than the stuff in the textbooks. And he projected his thoughts out into the class the way you might imagine an Elizabethan actor projecting Hamlet, or Julius Caesar, or Macbeth into the Globe Playhouse.

What Jim taught me, I suppose, was that theories of teaching are always to be distrusted. Teaching, real teaching, springs from the soul. It reflects, in the deepest way, the personality, the values, the emotional make-up, and the intellectual power of the teacher. Once the details of America's history had been engraved on their minds by Jim's brilliance as a teacher, his students embarked on a lifetime relationship with the history of their own country.

What are the broader lessons taught by such teachers and such events as "Teachers of the Year Awards Programs"?

The first lesson is the one taught by the famous photographic exhibition called "The Family of Man." In it we are shown, again and again, how parents serve as the first teachers of their children. An Australian Aborigine father is depicted as he demonstrates exactly how to bring some game down with a boomerang. Other children are also depicted as they absorb and internalize the paradigms represented by their parents and their elders.

So where human beings are concerned, the roles of parent and child, teacher and student, are innate and natural. We are the teaching species and must marvel at the extent to which our animal cousins understand by instinct what we must depict to our children over and over and over again. In turn, this explains the heavy role that falls on our professional teachers at the elementary, secondary, and higher education levels. Professional teachers are nothing less than parental continuations. And that's why we always feel so disappointed when they are less than brilliant or successful.

Secondly, the escalating complexity of modern technology has made teaching of more urgent importance to our society today than ever in the past. Learning how to pitch hay onto a cart was the kind of thing you could learn just by watching the others who were doing it. Learning how to initiate a shipment of 5,000 computers from Singapore to Saskatchewan by pushing the buttons on a computer, that is something you get to do only after a lot of preliminary training has taken place.

Teaching is, therefore, more important than at any earlier time in human history. That's an awareness we all share, and it helps to explain all the learners our society is now producing—people learning millions of lessons via the Internet, people piling into our community colleges in quest of better jobs or new careers, people whose applications flood the offices of major colleges and universities across America and the world.

And what all of this adds up to, it seems to me, is that teaching represents a profession that deserves a lot more praise and a lot more support. When your son or daughter comes home from high school and says that one of his or her teachers ran an exciting class today, a burst of heartfelt applause is in order. That teacher has actually succeeded in doing the first thing a teacher must do, which is to, as they say, "Turn the student on!"

The teacher must be excited by his or her subject matter. The teacher must feel a longing to pass that subject along. The teacher must never rest content with how he or she did it this year. Next year will be even more important! And the teacher, from kindergarten through postgraduate, must live in the awareness that what he or she is doing will actually make a powerful impact on American history.

Early in my remarks, I suggested that many of the figures we admire most in the Bible are, among other things, teachers. Let me conclude my remarks by suggesting to you that the role our Bible assigns to God is essentially that of a teacher.

First, God has to deal with some very rough customers, only recently departed from their Egyptian bondage. So they have to learn not to kill each other, not to steal from each other, and not to oppress each other.

Then God moves on to some subtler levels of teaching. He whispers in a "still, small voice" in the ear of a young prophet named Samuel. This voice is engaged in teaching truly major lessons.

God the Teacher has a different meaning for every one of us. Some will marvel at a prophet, like Isaiah, whose soaring messages are driven by such a force of human emotion. Others will thrill to the parables of Jesus or the letters of St. Paul. Still others will marvel at the books of Jonah, Ruth, and Ecclesiastes.

But none will have any difficulty in understanding that the role of teacher, because it is so important, is the one that gets played out again and again through the millennia, and it is, therefore, worthy even of God Himself!

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is President of The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and a Professor there of Public Administration. A member of Benjamin B. French Lodge No. 15 and the Scottish Rite Bodies of Washington, D.C., he has been instrumental in expanding the Scottish Rite Scholarship Program at GWU. For his outstanding service, he was invested a K.C.C.H. in 1991, crowned a 33° in 1993, and elected a Grand Cross in 1997. He was Master of Ceremonies at the 1999 Biennial Session Gala Banquet.