The Professors : How to Teach?

Overview
Ernest Dimnet’s The Professors: How to Teach? (1941) distills the observations of a lifelong teacher into a compact meditation on the vocation of teaching. Written in lucid, aphoristic prose, the book treats teaching as an art grounded in personality and conscience rather than a collection of tricks. Dimnet argues that method follows character: students learn most from the mind and moral tone of the teacher before them, and only then from techniques. Without denying the utility of plans and procedures, he places the teacher’s inner life, attention, honesty, intellectual curiosity, at the center of pedagogical effectiveness.

The Teacher’s Vocation
For Dimnet, a “professor” is first an exemplar. Authority grows from authenticity, not from noise or rigidity. He insists that enthusiasm is contagious, and that the teacher’s quiet passion for truth, literature, or science is the true engine of the classroom. Preparation is essential, but it must culminate in presence: the ability to face living students rather than recite a script. He urges humility about one’s limits, courage in one’s convictions, and steadiness of temper, since the climate of a class is set by the teacher’s self-command.

Knowing the Student
The book continually returns to the individual student as the measure of teaching. Dimnet warns against treating classes as abstractions; adolescent minds are uneven, impressionable, often self-conscious, and seldom reached by mere information. He proposes that attention, not memory, is the first goal; curiosity is awakened when a question becomes urgent to the learner. He favors starting from something concrete and intelligible, then moving toward principles, letting discovery feel earned rather than imposed. He values reading and writing as acts of thinking: assign fewer pages, ask for better sentences, and dwell on the meaning of words, because accuracy of language sharpens accuracy of thought.

Method and Classroom Practice
Dimnet does not prescribe a single method; he advocates a disciplined eclecticism. Lecture has its place when it is clear and brief; dialogue is indispensable when it draws out the student’s own resources. He counsels beginning each hour with a definite aim, framing it by a living question, and closing with a synthesis the student can retain. Silence and pacing matter: pauses invite thought; haste wastes it. Notes should be tools, not transcripts. Homework should be sparing, well designed, and corrected with care; it is better to assign one exercise that trains judgment than many that train mere habit. Examinations should test understanding rather than agility, and grades should be guides rather than verdicts.

Discipline and Authority
Order, in Dimnet’s view, is the condition of intellectual freedom. True authority is moral before it is procedural: fairness, consistency, and respect create obedience more reliably than severity. He warns against sarcasm, which wounds self-respect and closes minds, and he praises quiet humor, which disarms without humiliating. Discipline ought to protect the work of the classroom, not punish personalities; nothing undermines a lesson more than turning discipline into a spectacle.

Cultural Formation over Information
Dimnet repeatedly distinguishes culture from accumulation. Teaching should form judgment, taste, and a sense of proportion in knowledge. He urges teachers of literature and history to cultivate sympathetic reading, a feeling for sequence and cause, and an ear for style; teachers of the sciences should emphasize clarity of concept and the beauty of intelligible order. Early specialization is a temptation; he prefers breadth that stabilizes the mind before it narrows its focus.

The Teacher’s Self-Education
The book closes on the teacher’s ongoing apprenticeship: steady reading, thoughtful preparation, attention to voice and diction, and periodic self-critique. Dimnet exhorts teachers to guard their own interior life from routine: to refresh themselves in good books, conversations with colleagues, and the habit of noticing. Teaching, he suggests, succeeds when a living mind meets another and makes room for it to grow; the rest of pedagogy is the art of making that encounter possible, frequent, and fruitful.