Harkness Learning Is Still the News

My title is, I believe, particularly apt for The Exeter Bulletin; if there were ever a conspicuous preoccupation in its pages, it is with the prominence of Harkness learning at the Academy. What has prompted me to return to this intense Exeter focus is the news elegantly presented and well stated in the recent Academy publication “The Architecture of Teaching Science.” The principal has the initial message:

“I imagine the excitement we feel about our plans for the New Science Center to be similar to that felt by the original Harkness teachers when they set out to implement a new approach to teaching the humanities. Seventy years later, we are ready to bring Harkness teaching to the sciences, and our science department has planned exhaustively to ensure that this building will directly support its curricular goals.”

I remember Dick Niebling, who chaired the English Department, striding purposefully into the department room early one morning in October 1967, carrying in one hand a framed photograph, in the other a hammer. I could tell by his occupied motion and the twinkle in his eye that he relished this mission. He went to a blank section of wall near a corner and hammered a nail, then hung the black-and-white photograph of a man on a lawn, leaning on his left elbow as he lay on his side, an open book next to him. The face in the photograph struck me as a distinctly original one. It was a picture of George Bennett, Dick’s predecessor as head of the department.

Just the second month into my rookie year of teaching at Exeter, I had discovered the legend of George Bennett. One can get a sense of how prodigious that legend is by reading the memorial minute of the faculty that Dick Niebling wrote in 1965, the year George Bennett died.

“In the classroom his talent for listening encouraged participation; he was a master of the unsettling question that challenges a prejudice or puts a discussion back on the rails; he could sit without speaking for most of a period and then make a trenchant remark at the end.”

This description of the Bennett style got predictable endorsement from former Dean of Faculty Jack Heath, when in his fall 1983 Bulletin article “The Harkness System,” he noted that George Bennett “used to say that the best questions in a Harkness class were the unanswerable ones—by which he meant questions not answerable ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or by any other ‘right’ answer.”

In Heath’s assertion that “The essence is cooperative inquiry,” he builds on his earlier remarks that “the Harkness classroom is not a battleground but a proving ground,” and “in a Harkness class the students will not debate, but discuss; the teacher will not pronounce, but question.” In the fall of 1983, Jack Heath was levying on the pedagogical wisdom of George Bennett: his article “The Harkness System” is an identification of successful Harkness teaching with the professional style of a remarkable man.

Further endorsement of the Bennett style subsequently appears in the spring Bulletin of 1995: Chauncey Loomis ’48, and former trustee, in “The Harkness Table Revisited” has George Bennett’s example in mind when he argues that the agenda of a class should be the consequence of its ruminative energy. He says that thoughtfulness “is the most precious thing a school can give a student—and also the most precious thing a student can give a school.” We are talking about a reciprocal arrangement, a transaction: a teacher challenges his or her students; they begin to answer what they imagine the teacher’s “answer” might be, but as the teacher continues to remain silent—observing them with house-counting eyes, signaling, thereby, the students’ responsibility to speak—they begin to gather the palpable energy in the classroom to themselves. They begin, as Loomis says, to be “ambushed by their own intelligence,” and so to fulfill the calculation of the teacher: namely, for those who are learning to make the process of that learning their own agenda. (Jack Heath observed, and not entirely facetiously, that “The secret ideal of the Harkness teacher is to fall asleep in his own class.”)

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