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He Taught Me to Think
By Harry T. Cook
5/31/13
 | | Harry T. Cook |
His name was Joseph James Irwin, and, by the time I first encountered him in 1957 as the head of the English department at Albion College, he had been a member of the faculty there for 20 years. He was and remains the single most important influence on the development of my intellect. In fact, I go so far as to say that he taught me to think. Not quite incidental to that accomplishment, he exposed me to the breadth of English literature -- to the plays of William Shakespeare in particular as well as to the modern novel, both British and American. I was one of five students admitted to his creative writing seminar -- Julia Grice, later known for her romance novels, was another. But all that, as it turned out, did not constitute the main thing. The main thing was that his pedagogy engaged students in the Socratic method of education. We read novels, plays and other literature -- yes, to appreciate their particular art and to dwell upon the characters and stories depicted in them. But, in the end, we were bidden to engage in converse with him and our fellow students about what those stories and the characters depicted in them disclosed about the human condition and the times in which they were composed. Inquiry was everything. One seeking a decent grade did not come to Prof. Irwin's classes unprepared, not only in the text assigned for the day - say, the first two acts of Hamlet --but in the intrigues of the Elizabethan age. A bright young thing, new to the Irwin discipline, once wondered aloud as to how she was to find out all that. Prof. Irwin told her the library was about 100 yards, if that, due west of the building in which she was just then sitting. Being that I had arrived at college as a rube from a small-town high school, I might well have been the first to ask such a question. I learned that day how to avoid the necessity of ever doing so: by becoming a denizen of the library's reference room. At least I was not a slow rube. There I began to find out things not directly related to class assignments and to integrate that information with what I was gleaning from the study of Shakespeare and the modern novel -- the very thing Prof. Irwin had in mind for his students to do. I learned as much history in the modern novel course as I learned in the reading for a history class I had taken in an earlier term. That process, I later learned, is called "synthesis" -- perceiving how things are interrelated and how one idea can inform the understanding of another. It's also called "critical thinking." At no time while I was thus engaged did it occur to me that learning the substance of Shakespeare or the modern novel would help me make a living. That was not the point, and I think it was not Prof. Irwin's point. Though he did once suggest to me that, given my enthusiasm for the material, I might wish to consider an academic career in the field. As things would go along, I ended up vocationally in a strange combination of the ordained ministry and journalism with several terms of university teaching into the bargain. I came to see that the most important thing I brought to those jobs from my undergraduate years was the acquired ability to synthesize, to think across parallel lines and to perceive relationships among disparate ideas, concepts and propositions. In my later years, engaged more deeply in the research of biblical texts and the ideas to which those texts had given rise, as well as in the publishing of books in that general field, I came to realize and appreciate more and more what had been going on in Prof. Irwin's classroom 50 and more years before -- at least where I was concerned. I was learning to think. What college means to more and more students today is getting trained to do a particular job in a particular field at decent pay. Who can argue with that in an unforgiving, profit-driven, free-market, hyper-capitalistic environment? Can one go through life, earn a living, raise a family and retire in some semblance of security without ever having studied such texts as the Iliad, Oedipus Rex or Hamlet? Demonstrably. Many have, and many more will. More power to them. A number of those in Albion College's Class of 1961 went on to earn advanced degrees in the sciences, in medicine, education and the law. They were not, however, excused from some experience with the literary arts on their way to their later successes. You couldn't get a baccalaureate degree from Albion in those days without having studied a broad range of literature, history, a non-English language and religion. (I hope that is still the case.) Those requirements made some of my classmates impatient because they knew exactly what they wanted to do in life. Yet, without knowing for certain, I would guess most of them became in their full adulthood more thoughtful and less inclined to credit the cant and hypocrisy that passes for public discourse these days. That's because they learned to think -- and think again. The same would apply to students who graduated from institutions that did not necessarily stress the liberal arts, but who included them in their course work by choice. I would venture further to say that the trade-school orientation of some college and university curricula now more common in this country produces a different kind of citizen: one more apt to accept without question one bill of goods or another -- whether concerning economics or politics or religion -- not having been much engaged in critical thinking during his or her student years. The results of the by-election of 2014 and the presidential election of 2016 may shed some light on all that. Perhaps I could have learned to think critically if I had majored, rather than in English and philosophy, in history, mathematics or chemistry. But in one way or another I would have learned how to think, or I wouldn't have a diploma from that particular college on my study wall today. | 
