Teachers naturally have authority. They often stand in front of the classroom while their students sit at desks, listening and hopefully learning. In the old days, a teacher was called magister and magistra–words that doubled for commander, master, and even the captain of a ship.
Why do teachers have authority? They have experience, certainly. They have been places that students want to go. Good teachers know how not just to report on those places but can lead students to those places. A good teacher implicitly says, I can take you to where you want to go.
In Luke 6, Jesus says that when a student is fully-trained, he will be like his teacher. This verse, however, is paired with another in an antithetical parallel and comparison:
He also told them this parable: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit? The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.
This is perhaps Christ’s briefest parable. Imagine, for a moment, the folly of having a blind tour guide. This kind of leader clearly does not know the path, and tragically, has not seen what students yearn to see. Imagining this would be humorous if not laced with the sadness of blindness itself.
Have we not had a few teachers like this? Those who are teaching subjects with which they have no real familiarity, much less deep expertise? Teachers who don’t know where they are really going and thus cannot know the way there? They have a textbook however–which simply means the textbook (and the textbook company) must stand in for… a teacher. Too many teachers are beholden to textbooks making the textbook the only magister in the class and in effect turning the teacher into an agent of the textbook. When this happens, the teacher has a much compromised authority (or none), especially if he has no deep acquaintance with the auctores (authors) that make up the course he is teaching.
Students, real students anyway, want to see things. Many (like Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas) have noted that sight, as our most powerful sense, is the sense we most often use as a metaphor for knowing. How often we say things like “I see it now” and “I see what you’re saying.”
A teacher is no blind guide, but a guide with good vision, a good memory for what he has seen, and remembers well the paths to the great intellectual sites. The teacher, in other words, is the opposite of the blind guide, but he is a guide, he is a leader, and one worthy of following.
Our word “authority” is closely related to the word “author.” In Latin, we have auctoritas and auctor. To be an author / auctor one must already have auctoritas. This is especially true in the ancient and medieval world when it was no easy feat to become an auctor. Your book, to be “published,” had to attract enough attention such that people would be willing to hand-copy the book onto expensive parchment or vellum. In 400 AD, if you could write a book that others would copy and distribute–then you had auctorias and were in fact an auctor.
Still, at least at first, when a teacher strides into a room of raised faces, hoping to actually go somewhere–that teacher has authority. Why else would he be permitted to be the one who walked to the front of the class, mysterious book in hand? He at least has authority of office. Some, hopefully most, students are willing to be led by him. But the authority of office and the authority of having seen (having been there) are two different things. The hopes of students are slowly crushed by educational technicians who serve textbooks rather than rule over them. The teacher these students yearn for is the teacher who himself is a walking textbook because all of the relevant auctores live within him and comprise his true and deepest authority. This teacher is a magister–a master of his discipline.
How we need a growing core of such master-teachers who will multiply students, who when fully-trained, will become teachers in their own right, and who will teach with authority.