The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World

by Yun Lee Too

The Pedagogical Contract explores the relationship between teacher and student and argues for ways of reconceiving pedagogy. It discloses this relationship as one that since antiquity has been regarded as a scene of give-and-take, where the teacher exchanges knowledge for some sort of payment by the student and where pedagogy always runs the risk of becoming a broken contract. The book seeks to liberate teaching and learning from this historical scene and the anxieties that it engenders, arguing that there are alternative ways of conceiving the economy underlying pedagogical activities.
Reading ancient material together with contemporary representations of teaching and learning, Yun Lee Too shows that apart from being conceived as a scene of self-interest in which a professional teacher, or sophist, is the charlatan who cheats his pupil, pedagogy might also purport to be a disinterested process of socialization or a scene in which lack and neediness are redeemed through the realization that they are required precisely to stimulate the desire to learn. The author also argues that pedagogy ideally ignores the imperative of the conventional marketplace for relevance, utility, and productivity, inasmuch as teaching and learning most enrich a community when they disregard the immediate material concerns of the community.
The book will appeal to all those who understand scholarship as having an important social and/or political role to play; it will also be of interest to literary scholars, literary and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, legal theorists, feminists, scholars of education, sociologists, and political theorists.
Yun Lee Too is Assistant Professor of Classics, Columbia University. She is the author of Rethinking Sexual Harassment; The Rhetoric of Identity in Text, Power, Pedagogy; and The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism , forthcoming; and coeditor, with Niall Livingstone, of Pedagogy and Rhetorics of Classical Learning .

184 pages, Hardcover

First published July 13, 2000

Reviews

[Prerna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book employs a historical materialist view of the modes/rhetorics of teaching and learning in the ancient world, but through a contemporary lens . We might be inclined to conclude that such a representation will be flawed, of course ancient cultures are significantly different from the ones we inhabit now and a study of them using current methods might be unjust. But the author here rightly points out that the past and present are intertwined, and can be understood better when placed in relation to each other. And anyway, present modes of teaching are very influenced by and even have their roots in the western antiquity.

The author brilliantly identifies an un-socratic moment within the pedagogical contract - a moment that extends even beyond the disciplinary, and is vulnerable in its crude form of give-and-take.

The emphasis on research in academia, especially within the humanities, as an indicator of the weariness directed at the pedagogical contract is also very well surmised in the book. Contemporary academia fetishizes research such that an academic who publishes unremarkable books/papers is valued and paid more than an academic who publishes less but teachers better - the pedagogical relationship between the student and teacher is thus commodified.

Since the time of sophists, education as a training for good citizenship has also been detrimental to deciding the curriculum. And so conservatives who are threatened by minority groups and 'others', dangerously push against feminist, marxist, black and lgbtq studies

For a fulfillment of the contract in its current form, the teacher requires that student recognise his role as a pedagogue and the student demands that the teacher assist in attaining professional goals, there's a power structure inherent to this relationship. Education, as it stands today, reproduces social heirarchies and class antagonisms.

Implicit within the pedagogical contract are desire and erotics, pedagogical desire in its current unacknowledged form poses a threat to learning by forming a complex amalgam with other structural heirarchies. As the author points out in this book, Marjorie Garber has written about de-personalising this desire so its transference to the student-teacher relationship can be avoided.

Learning is a process full of uncertainties and even failures, and as such cannot be encapsulated by the give-and-take form of the current pedagogical techniques. In order to truly get the most of learning, we will have to find alternatives to the historical pedagogical contract that reduces the 'teacher' and 'student' to strictly defined roles.

Once we relinquish the notion that the articulation of knowledge is identical with its reception and understanding, then we must admit that what the student may come know and learn is distinct from what the teacher already knows and thinks. The logical conclusion is recognition that the teacher stages learning and is present so that the student may have an other against which to orient himself - an other in terms of ideology, methodology, belief, but also in terms of sex, race, sexuality, class, and so on.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too's claim is that teachers and students are “roles” not “essential identities” (2). “As represented by Classical Greek authors […] the interaction between teacher and student is a give-and-take of a particular kind. The teacher gives away something of value—a body of knowledge, a set of skills, a way of thinking of living, and so one—in return for which the student renders some form of payment, perhaps a salary, a gift or gratitude” (7). Strangely, teachers are supposed to be somehow altruistic, not accepting money (or a pittance) for their work, and the question arises: can students be taught? And “teachers offer themselves up to their students, ideal texts or models of conduct to be assimilated” (45).