"The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity"
About this Quote
There is a quiet provocation in Brault's line: the "average" teacher performs intelligence, while the "gifted" teacher performs judgment. Explaining complexity can be an academic reflex, a kind of protective camouflage. If the subject stays tangled, the instructor stays indispensable. Complexity also flatters the teacher's status: look how much there is to know, look how far ahead I am.
"Reveals simplicity" flips that status game. Reveal is the operative verb, implying the simplicity was always there, buried under jargon, anxious overqualification, and the institutional habit of making learning feel like an obstacle course. Brault isn't praising dumbing down; he's praising distillation. Gifted teaching is less about accumulating facts than choosing the right lens - the core principle, the clean metaphor, the decisive example - that lets a student see structure instead of noise. It's an editorial act: subtraction as mastery.
The subtext also carries a moral claim about power. A teacher who can make ideas legible shares authority with the learner; they make the student capable of independent thought. The teacher who luxuriates in complexity can keep the learner dependent, impressed, and slightly ashamed.
Context matters: Brault writes in a late-20th-century culture that increasingly rewards specialized language and credentialed expertise. His aphorism pushes back, arguing that real expertise isn't how much complexity you can introduce, but how responsibly you can remove it without lying. Simplicity, here, is not the absence of depth; it's depth made usable.
"Reveals simplicity" flips that status game. Reveal is the operative verb, implying the simplicity was always there, buried under jargon, anxious overqualification, and the institutional habit of making learning feel like an obstacle course. Brault isn't praising dumbing down; he's praising distillation. Gifted teaching is less about accumulating facts than choosing the right lens - the core principle, the clean metaphor, the decisive example - that lets a student see structure instead of noise. It's an editorial act: subtraction as mastery.
The subtext also carries a moral claim about power. A teacher who can make ideas legible shares authority with the learner; they make the student capable of independent thought. The teacher who luxuriates in complexity can keep the learner dependent, impressed, and slightly ashamed.
Context matters: Brault writes in a late-20th-century culture that increasingly rewards specialized language and credentialed expertise. His aphorism pushes back, arguing that real expertise isn't how much complexity you can introduce, but how responsibly you can remove it without lying. Simplicity, here, is not the absence of depth; it's depth made usable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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