Editors' Introduction: Teaching in a Time of War

There are certain historical moments when learning is more compressed and intense than [at] others. . . . After September 11, this is one of those moments.

—Howard Zinn (2001)

When Jennifer met her senior capstone class on the morning of 11 September, the assigned topic for the day had been "why we do the work we do": the class was to have discussed how we in the discipline of English can justify our disciplinary work when such need exists in the world. While this question, framed as it was by urgent current events, became the question of the semester, on that morning the class had little to say except in the prayers they offered together.

When Marcy met her class of preservice teachers on 12 September, she started the class period by asking: "Imagine that you are teaching and something like this happens. What will you say to your students?" She started this way not only to get them to reflect on their own practice but, frankly, because she did not know how else to begin. She hoped that they would let her know, through their responses, what she should say to them. It would have been absurd to ignore what had happened the day before, but what sort of response was ethical and productive?

We would guess that for many of us, our classrooms became unfamiliar in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York City. The urge was either to ignore—to push past the distress with business as usual—or, perhaps, to stop cold, to feel our discipline's impotence (what does literature or critical theory or writing have to offer in the face of this?).

The Oxford don C. S. Lewis opened his sermon "Learning in War-Time" (1965 [1939]: 43) with the following question:

A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

One response is that language and philosophy and history and literature can provide the critical and ethical tools for engaging the ills of the "real world." Marjorie Hope Nicholson (2000 [1963]: 1867), in her presidential address to the Modern Language Association, pointed to John Milton's Of Education as containing the most just definition of a liberal education: "I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man [or woman] to perform justly, skilfully [sic], and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." That is, despite what may seem by now a cliché of liberatory pedagogy, the university must persist because "these placid occupations" offer relevant means for action in the world.

But maybe we should think differently about the role of teaching during these times. In "Learning in War-Time" Lewis (1965 [1939]: 44) goes on to assert:

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men [and women] had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare...