Foreword

As teachers at an American university whose founder was also one of the founders of American democracy, we speak often of freedom, usually the academic variety. Academic freedom, as it concerns the teacher, enables her or him to express scholarly views no matter how controversial. Academic freedom, as it concerns the student, enables what John Dewey calls "a freed capacity of thought." It is the freedom that education confers on the educated.

Jefferson argued that education liberates students when he wrote, "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." According to Jefferson, to be educated is to be intellectually and morally autonomous. An educated person is freed of the tyranny of received but unexamined knowledge, otherwise known as "indoctrination." Education teaches how to reason. Reason implies the capacity for intellectual and moral autonomy, and provides a means to resist oppression of any kind.

In this equation, then, the teacher, the one who leads the student to reason, liberates the student's intellect. The best teachers recognize the gravity of this role and commit thought, time, energy, and effort to the work they do in the classroom. Because the teacher works to instill in students autonomous habits of mind, teaching is a dialogue, even when lecture is its format. Students always have the right to respond to their teachers' statements, even if the response is not part of the classroom regimen. Students will write you essays and exams, and they will argue with you mentally and in absentia with others standing in for you.

This dialogical relationship requires much of both teacher and student. Of the teacher, it requires the imagination to anticipate and prepare for student responses, the capacity to entertain points of view different from one's own, and a largeness of spirit that allows the teacher ultimately to cede control of thought to the student. For, when a lesson is complete, it no longer is the teacher's sole possession. It has passed into the student's control and the student's realm of intellectual responsibility.

Plato's Socrates, the master of the educational dialogue, points out that "the direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life." This handbook will help you help students find that direction, locate their intellectual orientations. It will guide you to ways to teach so that your students may discover what they think about what you have taught them. In your work, strive to cultivate your students' capacity for independent thought so that they will be free to go make a place for themselves in the world. All of us dedicated to academic freedom know that the world will be better for that freedom they have gained in your classroom.

John T. Casteen III
President
University of Virginia