It’s true that you don’t need a master’s degree to teach in a Waldorf school (not that this is necessarily a good thing). Having an advanced degree does not make you (necessarily) a better teacher.
The common wisdom, however, that, at the university level, professors with advanced degrees are so distracted by research that they don’t or can’t really teach, is false. Research by Robert McCaughey, chair of the history department at Barnard College, across a number of universities shows the strong correlations among research, advanced degrees, recognition from colleagues, and great teaching. The best teachers in universities, as ranked by their unforgiving students, are those who have contributed to their fields, obtained the highest degrees, and kept open and alive their commitments to research and to teaching—these are, at a high level, one and the same.
I believe the same could apply to high school, elementary school, and even early childhood teachers.
Let me examine briefly what it takes to get a master’s degree.
You start with some ideas about graduate school and a fear of formal writing. You haven’t been in school in years, maybe decades. You don’t know how to cite a reference according to the Style Manual of the American Psychological Association or the Modern Language Association. Until now, you have had better things to do.
You want to write a thesis that will change the wacky Waldorf world, bite off a big piece of research and chew it well. Colleagues will read your work and recognize your expertise. Journals will seek you out. Young children with wide eyes will ask for your autograph. You also want to graduate on time.
Your advisor and your cohort help you find and hone some topic in which you’re interested, something not too large or too small. About 45 pages worth, give or take. You talk through topic, questions, methods, literature with your advisor. You badger your spouse and colleagues. You can’t sleep. You pile books on a table or nightstand. Good job. As my wife says, if you buy the fabric, you’ve made the quilt.
You type the title page, including the statement at the bottom, “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements…” You feel like you’re halfway there.
You write a sentence, a paragraph. You type quotations into a laptop or, like me, you stick an army of post-its into your books. Progress.
Gradually, you steal hours here and there. Your husband take the kids to his parents for the weekend and, after watching five hours of television, folding all the laundry, and cleaning the kitchen, you start to write. As David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, says, “everyone knows it takes eight hours to write for two hours.”
In Milan, a monk complained that Leonardo da Vinci, who was supposed to be painting “The Last Supper,” spent too much time sitting in front of the painting doing nothing. Who knew? Leonardo wasn’t just a painter and an original thinker. He was a graduate student. Really, of course, like you, he was deep in contemplation.
Gradually, your work takes shape. You fill it in like a puzzle: A bit of chapter three, some more in chapter two. It hurts, but you throw away whole paragraphs that no longer fit. If you’re like me, you cut these but you can’t stand to see them go. I paste them, in order, at the end of the paper. Sometimes what I end up with is shorter than the unused paragraphs stuck at the end, waiting in vain for their moment. I wrote them. They must mean something.
You start talking nonsense, a sign of regression in normal people, but not you; you’re a graduate student. You believe you know what you mean when you type something like, “hermeneutic contemplation and theoretical misgivings in the Weltanschauung of the Zeitgeist.” I gave my wife a few pages to edit. She said, “I don’t understand a word of this.” “Good,” I said, “my education is working.”
You’ve never interviewed anyone in your life, but you do it. You draw up a list of questions, make an appointment, and, before you know it, you’ve completed an interview of an hour and a quarter. Interviews are easier after this, although why do people insist on talking about what they want to talk about instead of what you want to know about?
Or you write a questionnaire and mail it out. A few people even send it back. But instead of filling in the ovals you’ve provided, they’ve written comments in the margins. Or circled two answers where you asked for one. You are learning to collect and interpret data.
Things take shape. When ninety percent is complete, you’re halfway there. You track down those missing references. You try to write a conclusion that’s not just a re-statement of your introduction. Despite the demands of job and family, you make progress. Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, when asked about his life between performances said, “You know, I have a second career running errands.
You get emails from the college with forms A through H attached. These supersede the old forms A through H you got last semester, and they have no relation to the handbook you got when you started this work.
You stay up until four one morning, putting on the finishing touches. You email a draft to your advisor and then wait weeks… and weeks. You’ve taken years to do this, but you want a response immediately.
You finally get your paper back, and then you get to comb through to remove the passive voice, rewrite the introduction, cut unsupported statements, trim and groom your baby.
The great day arrives when your thesis is approved. You feel like you lost fifty pounds, like an astronaut on the moon, like a childhood dream of flying. And then you eat half a pound of pepperoni from the little zip-loc baggie, inhale a pint of Chunkie Monkey, and take a nap.
What did you learn? You learned a lot, but I’m not talking about your topic.
Here are some of the things you learned:
To think clearly and contemplatively.
To speak meaningfully.
To write well.
To read with interest and intelligence.
To have a sense of scale and proportion.
To appreciate objectivity as a goal, if not as an absolute.
To adapt to changing circumstances.
To synthesize disparate and unanticipated results and points of view.
To interpret.
To judge.
To persevere.
To compromise.
To find and create a community of support in which to accomplish all this.
These are qualities I would like to see in all teachers.
And, you’ll notice, I haven’t even mentioned the thesis topic. From this point of view, the topic, the form, the content, the results are all beside the point. No one else will ever read your thesis. Your husband and your second reader and your advisor read it because they love you. And because they had to. These things are not mutually exclusive.
The point is the capacities that you have to exercise and develop in order to complete a degree. Yes, some of it is inherited from the Middle Ages, the caps, the gowns, the inquisition. And perhaps those parts are what people object to when they say you don’t need a master’s degree to teach in a Waldorf school.
I don’t mean to minimize the research that goes into this work. But to be a researcher does not always mean to write formal papers, although these are an accepted medium for such work.
To conduct research is to be alive to possibility, to believe that there’s truth beyond simply the truth that I know today, and this is one of the highest qualities that we can ask for in a teacher, a quality that makes teaching so creative and so difficult and so humbling.
Teachers are researchers. They conduct action-research and longitudinal studies as participant-observers with sample sizes of a couple of dozen over years. They discuss findings with colleagues and fellow-researchers from next door and down the hall. (What they often fail to do is synthesize and interpret their results.) And the better prepared they are to conduct their research, the better for our children.
