Teaching: Weaving the Threads of Our Future : * Culture: Economic cutbacks have left more people to learn things on their own, which hurts both apprentice and master.

We are rapidly becoming a society without apprentices and, therefore, a society without masters. Much has been made of the fact that in a few years, a good tailor or shoemaker will be harder to find than a blacksmith. In my field, advertising, there used to be junior art directors and copywriters, each assigned to a senior person whom they would assist on projects, learning by watching the master at work. Today, junior people are mostly on their own, economics having forced agencies to bill as much of their senior people’s time as possible.

As a result, young writers and art directors learn their craft by doing, yet there are some key things they learn too late or not at all. And the senior people are denied the opportunity to teach, to make conscious what they have learned to do almost instinctively. This is occurring in almost every field. Instead of apprenticeship programs and real on-the-job training, we have a proliferation of seminars and classes in subjects on the periphery of people’s jobs: training on a new software program, time management, touchy/feely values clarification exercises for managers.

Meanwhile, we are losing the thread the connects one generation to the next, the thread from which we weave our culture. And it’s not just the quality of the fabric that suffers. We, the weavers, suffer too, because to teach is to participate in the act of being fully human, the act of learning. Learning is the life force of our species, the rope we used to pull ourselves above the apes. It’s the seed that blossomed into language. And it’s the one act, even more than love, that keeps us human.

I began teaching, my first career, 15 years ago while I was a graduate student in English literature. For seven years, I taught remedial writing and composition to ill-prepared college freshmen. Then economics forced me to take a job writing advertising.

Each day for the past eight years, I have missed teaching. I have missed participating in the intimate dance of teacher and student. During that time, I have written novels, journalism, academic articles, TV commercials, radio spots, videos. But nothing has taught me more about the secrets of my craft than teaching writing to students who have never learned the value of it.

And so this past semester, I decided to teach again two nights a week at a nearby university. I have no illusions. My students come to class with only one hope, that I will tell them the secret other teachers have withheld, and that by doing so, I will grant them membership into the club. Instead, I show them that the secret is in the doing. It’s in the act of writing. Every piece of writing contains its own secret, which exists only if the writer finds it. This is something every writer must learn every time he writes. It is something I have learned from teaching.

Every subject has its secrets; so, too, every craft and every art, from woodworking to engineering, history, cooking, physics, even accounting. For all I know, the secret is the same--namely, that there is no secret. But that, too, is a secret. And those best able to discover this truth and pass it along are those who practice their craft, live their subject, do their art.

And yet, in almost every case these people, the masters, make much more money not teaching. Our society rewards producing so much more than teaching that the masters work alone now, hoarding their gifts.

I am not suggesting that money isn’t the proper motivation for work. After all, I write advertising 40 hours a week instead of teaching. I am suggesting that those of us who know how to do something well can make our money and still find ways to pass along our gifts. We can teach night classes at community colleges and vocational schools, tutor high school students, coach Little League, direct local theater, establish internship or apprenticeship programs at our places of business.

And we can do this not out of a sense of community service but out of pure selfishness: for the love of what we do, for the things we can learn about our craft only through teaching. And by doing so, we strengthen the thread that ties one generation to the next and discover that the thread we use to weave our own work is made stronger, too.