“Have you yet recognized that you are and always have been your own teacher?”

These words have stayed in my mind since 2006, when I first noticed them stretched across a prominent wall inside St. John’s College in Annapolis, the Great Books school and my graduate alma mater. They come from Scott Buchanan, the program co-founder, in his 1958 speech “The Last Don Rag.” It goes on:

Amidst all the noise and furor about education in this country at present, I have yet to hear this question raised. But it is basic. Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher.

As I did, many come to study at the Graduate Institute at St. John’s in order to get the liberal arts education they missed as an undergraduate. I believe many enroll not just for the roundtable discussions, but also simply to get time, structure, and credit for being their own teacher.

Being one’s own teacher means taking responsibility for actively charting one’s own educational course, pressing far beyond “externally imposed classes,” as Buchanan puts it, and refusing to settle for blaming the educational system for one’s shortcomings. But charting one’s own course does not mean always going alone. On the contrary, it means understanding that mentors and peers are essential—as is seeking them out. Humans are mimetic and social beings, and even the most independent individualist needs models, guides, and fellow seekers.

But young children read books and are their own teacher. So how is it that, later in life, adults need Buchanan’s reminder? In part, it is because of forces that pull us toward conformity and complacency, such as what Buchanan calls the “winds of doctrine” and the “jungle of ideologies,” as well as the simplicity of nihilism and the comfort zone of overspecialization. Being one’s own teacher requires resisting these external forces, he says, by listening to the truth-seeking voice in ourselves, however faint: “Have you listened to the small spontaneous voice within that asks continually if these things are true? … Do you believe that knowledge is possible, that truth is attainable, and that it is always your business to seek it, although evidence is overwhelmingly against it?”

Given the forces conspiring to discourage independent minds, what inspires them to continue being their own teacher? Sometimes it is being jarred by the recognition of a lost opportunity, as I was recently when reflecting on the AP US history class I took during my junior year from 1989–90 at Gonzaga, a Catholic high school in Washington, DC. Yes, the class was eighth period, the last period of the day. Yes, it was taught by a rotund Jesuit priest who lectured at a glacial pace and was hard to follow. And it’s true that there were no visuals at all: no outlines to refer to, no notes on the board, no handouts, no overhead projector images, and no slides. It was an hour of soporific lecturing, with very few questions to engage the students, followed by an announcement of another 20 pages of reading for homework. In class, I spent much of the time sleeping and surreptitiously exchanging jokes with my friend. Somehow I managed to get a B+, but what I learned was better indicated by the 2 out of 5 I got on the AP exam.

But I now realize that the primary cause of my poor performance in AP US History was my own approach to the class. I lost sight of being my own teacher. Over the past two years, in addition to teaching, I have tutored online over 600 hours. To expand my tutoring subjects, this summer I have been studying AP US History—the same course I slept through over three decades ago. It’s fascinating. Six weeks engrossed in the 5 Steps to a 5: AP US History study guide, Googling terms and tangents, making notes in the margins, and watching videos have helped tie together countless bits of prior knowledge into a more cohesive narrative. And as I near the end, I realize, “I could have done this 34 years ago. What was I doing during eighth period in eleventh grade?” All that was necessary was a book and a student, being his own teacher.

I found plenty of time for The Washington Post that year, on hour-long bus commutes, during lunch, and sometimes during AP US History class. But somehow, I never found 20 or 30 minutes to read the history textbook, as others who got As did. Had I recognized early on that I simply was not going to learn much from this teacher, abandoned all expectations about the lectures, and treated the course as purely self-study—and better yet, as if I were preparing to tutor students in it—I would have learned far more. But I think that being in school all day has a way of conditioning students to look to the teacher for things they could provide for themselves.

It would not be until over a decade after AP US History class, after seeing the student experience from the teacher’s side—especially how effort often trumps talent in the game of grades—that I would fully realize how having an ineffective teacher is a reason to put in more effort and attention, not less, and be one’s own teacher. Luckily, by the time I started graduate school, I had finally learned this lesson the hard way. But my eleventh-grade self needed someone to step in and say,

Snap out of it! Checking out only exacerbates a difficult situation. This is the history of your country, my friend. In a few decades, there will be teachers who misrepresent your history to push their agendas, so you’d better know it well if you want to defend yourself and stick up for the truth. And guess what? You might be teaching this stuff one day, in school and to your kids. So do a little bit of reading every night. It will make this class a lot easier. And it will open a lot of doors in the future.

But recognizing that you are your own teacher means more than finding motivation. It also means embracing adversity and pushing through discouragement. “[H]ave you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn?” asks Buchanan. “Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedoms arise.”

Sometimes a spark makes the fires come back strong. One day the AP US History teacher was absent. A different Jesuit priest came to substitute. He had been given no lesson plan. So he told us he was going to teach about something he found interesting, the Cuban Missile Crisis. He told the story well, and with chalk, he drew Cuba on the board, and the Russian missiles pointed at Florida. He wrote the key dates and names: Castro, Kennedy, Khrushchev, LBJ, and McNamara. We learned about the larger context of the Cold War, and proxy wars in other countries I had never heard of. It was a story of suspense, and I watched and listened with rapt attention. When the bell rang, I was disappointed that we had to stop. Inside my head, my brain exclaimed, “This is US history? Can we keep this guy?” The contrast between the regular teacher and the substitute made it unmistakably clear what a difference a good teacher makes. A good teacher inspires students to want to explore more—to want to be their own teacher.

This was the case also in my freshman and sophomore years when I had two social studies teachers who were legendary at Gonzaga. For grade 9 World Cultures, there was Fr. McKee, the self-declared “Zen Buddhist Jesuit priest.” He taught us about faraway places and ways of life: Zoroastrianism and ziggurats, Hindus bathing in the Ganges River, Mayan pyramids, and nirvana and karma. And in grade 10, I had Mr. Carolan, who bore some resemblance to Doc Brown in Back to the Future. He entered the classroom each day with no book, no notes, picked up a piece of chalk, and told the story of European history from memory, while writing an impeccable outline and detailed maps on the chalkboard. He interspersed fact-filled stories with funny details, jokes, and memorable phrases—like Charles “The Hammer” Martel defeating the “Moors at Tours.” He physically re-enacted the defenestration of Prague by tossing various classroom items out the window. A smoker, Mr. Carolan on a rare occasion would illustrate a fiery episode of history by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. Both Fr. McKee and Mr. Carolan modeled independent thought and unique ways of teaching. They were so off-script, so quirky and idiosyncratic, and so knowledgeable and adept at conveying social studies that they were obviously not just the product of a cookie-cutter educational system, but of a lifetime of being their own teacher.

But being your own teacher does not require such idiosyncrasies and special effects. For example, in my sophomore year at Gonzaga, I had Fr. Bidinger for biology, who had just been ordained a few years before and later went on to be a principal and president of other Jesuit high schools, and the chaplain at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. In Fr. Bidinger’s class, we simply opened the textbook and carefully read through it together. He stopped frequently to explain the concepts and diagrams and ask students questions about what was on the page, and he checked our understanding. That was it. And that was a lot. I learned a ton about biology. And it demonstrated how much we could continue to learn on our own by methodically going through good books. A year later in AP US History, I forgot this.

“You see? Do you really think students today want to be their own teacher?” one might object. “Many students bristle at doing even the simplest homework exercises. How will they be burning the midnight oil in the library?” This is certainly a fair question. But it is often astounding how the way a lesson is presented changes the game. As Elon Musk said in his keynote address at the 2017 International Space Station Research and Development Conference, while context and problem-solving are what students’ brains naturally grab onto, these are often absent in the classroom. “[T]eachers do not explain why kids are being taught a subject,” said Musk. “The why of things is extremely important because our brain has evolved to discard information that it thinks has no relevance. You just sort of get dumped into math. Why are you learning math? What’s the point of this? [Students say] I don’t know why am I being asked to do these strange problems.”

Give students a problem, show its importance, equip them with the concepts and materials to solve it, and let them solve it. This is often called “project-based learning (PBL).” But the problem with much of what passes for PBL is that the educators do not do enough preparation to give students the conceptual and/or physical tools necessary to invent or execute the project. 

Real PBL often takes a long time to set up, but it can be done. For example, in geography, I often assign a project to design a plan for a trip to another part of the world. The trip must visit five specific types of stops, which I change depending on what type of geography class it is (physical, cultural, world regional, etc.): for example, a place where globalization is evident on the landscape; an urban ecosystem; a religious landscape; an indigenous culture region; the site of a transnational border issue; the habitat of an endangered species; a political conflict zone. I teach students all these geographic concepts, with examples, along with the cartographic nuts and bolts to make maps to illustrate and communicate their trips. And I teach them research tools for finding their stops, including ways to navigate books, websites, and databases. Once students have constructed and mapped their trip, they write a research-based background analysis of each stop so they are prepared to understand and interact with what they find when they arrive. Within the given parameters, the students make all the choices as to where they are going. 

I emphasize that this assignment is practice, to help them design real trips in the future. It shows students who have rarely or never planned any trips that they can do it. In fact, one former college student who moved overseas emailed me a few years after class to say that she had now visited all five of her class project stops. So giving students a concrete problem that they naturally want to solve, and providing the tools and structure to do it, is an effective way to encourage them to be their own teacher. This is one area in which the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program, which I have taught in at several schools, excels: It provides many types of structures in which students can design their own essays, investigations, and activities, defining their own problems and seeking the solutions.

There are endless debates about how to improve educational systems. But ironically, one of the best ways to help students is to equip them to cope with broken systems. We should instill the idea that no class can personalize learning like an individual who is adept at being their own teacher. If there is one thing that tutoring has taught me, it is that students—like my former self in AP US History—need encouragement in the face of the clanging and smoke of the educational Crazy Train to keep from getting derailed. They need reminders of what they can still do. When schools declare “we don’t use textbooks,” as many do today, find your own in the library or online. Track down knowledgeable people, wherever they might be, and ask a lot of questions. Become a connoisseur of resources that can teach what teachers will not or cannot. We need to strengthen the educational street smarts of young people, so that even when all the other factors point toward failure, they have the resilience to progress forward and be part of the Great Conversation.