Abstract
Learning To Not Teach was first published in Exchange: The Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal in October, 1979. In presenting this paper with the Lasting Impact Award, our thinking was simple: in the 50th year of the Management and Organization Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS), what could be more seminal than the first published teaching philosophy in its oldest journal? Sadly, Jerry Harvey passed away in 2015. He was not known to either of us. But we have come to know and be inspired by him through his works. It is therefore our great, but challenging honor, to try and represent Harvey’s piece as best possible. In this we are indebted to scholars such as Dent (2017) and Sparks (forthcoming) who have so passionately recollected their time as students and colleagues of Jerry Harvey.
Why Learning To Not Teach?
With 13 Google Scholar citations, traditional measures do not reflect the insight of Harvey’s piece. The paper was published at a time when the journal was produced on photocopy and circulated through traditional mail only to US-based institutions. Access issues continue to restrict the article’s availability today, where it can be obtained only through institutions with upgraded database subscriptions. However, a reflective reading of Jerry Harvey’s manuscript reveals the timelessness and timeliness of his words, more than 40 years after he penned them. We find his work relatable and contemporary: a strong testament to how it holds a mirror up to our understanding of the topic of learning versus teaching. We hope that this Lasting Impact Award brings Learning To Not Teach to the wider audience it deserves and that it continues to challenge current and future management educators.
What makes this article special? To explain, one must first situate the article in the chronology of Harvey’s career. In his 1974 piece The Abilene Paradox, Harvey counterintuitively concluded organizational dysfunction was driven by an inability to manage agreement (Harvey, 1974). In his next major piece, Organizations as Phrog Farms, Harvey (1977) presented a series of 35 points on organizations in which he adopted the metaphor of a swamp to explain how they turn their workers into phrogs (spelt this way because phrogs don’t like to be known as frogs), in a trapped and lonely existence without meaning.
Learning To Not Teach emerges both conceptually and stylistically from these earlier pieces. Combining the nonconformist reasoning of The Abilene Paradox with the provocation, form, and humor of Organizations as Phrog Farms, Learning To Not Teach explores the ongoing management education issue of learning versus teaching. The result is a striking piece, a collection of 28 challenges to the management educator in which Harvey prosecutes the case for the superiority of learning over teaching.
What emerges are a series of memorable statements. Beginning with the claim “I gave up trying to teach long ago,” (1979, p. 19), Harvey (1979) proceeds through a series of provocations. These include a critique of teaching as based on an “illusion that the power to grow lies with someone else,” (p. 19) a swipe at colleagues who take responsibility for students’ learning, and an associated disdain for grading. “I never find grading a satisfactory experience,” says Harvey, “it deals with teaching, evaluation, accreditation, indoctrination, control, and unthought. It’s demeaning to all parties” (1979, p. 20).
At the heart of Harvey’s assessment of teaching is the observation that it implies the responsibility for learning belongs to the professor. The outcome of this thinking is that if the student does badly, the professor is at fault, but if they perform competently then the professor must take credit. For Harvey, this equation is troubling because it diminishes the essence of the student. “For all intents and purposes, then, the student doesn’t exist, except as a sort of inanimate, passive receptacle for the professor’s competence or incompetence” (Harvey, 1979, p. 20).
If overcoming the diminution of human nature implied by teaching is to be achieved through learning, then what is learning? In his piece, Harvey does more to malign the subject of teaching than he does to outline a process of learning. However, he does provide some hints. First, learning is a more difficult task than teaching. This situation arises because learning deals with human essence. According to Harvey (1979), “what others learn, if anything, is up to them.” Where the concept of teaching means it is easy to define oneself as a teacher, the learning approach instead raises existential questions. “When I take seriously the proposition that I am not responsible for students’ learning, I become very anxious because it forces me to ask once again, ‘what is my job?’ I wish I could say I’ve developed a satisfactory answer” (Harvey, 1979, p. 20).
While Harvey does not offer an illustration of what a learning approach might look like in the classroom, we are indebted to his student Will Sparks for providing an insight.
Learning Versus Teaching in the Management Education Classroom
By the time Will Sparks made it into Harvey’s organizational dynamics classroom in 1996, the learning approach was in full practice. Recounting his experience, Sparks (forthcoming) details how Harvey entered the classroom on the first day and asked the students “what are we here to do?” One student responded that the group was there to learn from their professor. Replying, “I’ve got nothing to teach you,” Harvey gave the students another opportunity to answer the question. When they failed to do so, he exited the classroom and didn’t return.
In the second week of the class, Harvey began with the same question. One student responded that they were present to hear Harvey’s take on meditations from his recently released book (Harvey, 1988). Again, Harvey responded by walking out the door.
The students later reconvened to consider the mystery of their absent professor and what they could do about it. One student expressed the view that perhaps the class would be evaluated on their ability to learn and grow, and that their current predicament was a part of this learning experience. It proved a discerning insight.
On Harvey’s arrival for the third class, he again began with the same question. At this point, one student confessed Harvey’s approach was making her feel anxious and frustrated. This provided the moment for Harvey to explain that it wasn’t him creating these frustrations for his students, rather that it was their expectations for a co-dependent professor which were driving their anxiety. Sparks claims it was at this very moment that the collective eyes of the class were opened as they realized it would be their own individual psychopathology and unconscious needs which were to be the focus of their learning.
But while a tenured and ornery professor such as Harvey might be able to walk out of class to teach students about themselves, the approach is more likely to have career consequences for an untenured teaching-focused academic. And while it may not be problematic for Harvey to declare student evaluation forms “are not useful to me, so I never look at them” (1979, p. 20), academic employment selection panels are unlikely to take such a dismissive attitude. Therefore, what does Harvey’s learning approach mean for management educators today?
If there is a lineage from Harvey’s work to the present day in management education, it can be seen in approaches which emphasize the formation of Aristotlean virtue – justice, empathy, kindness, and decency (Halliday & Johnsson, 2009). Just as Harvey argued that learning must eventually come down to the character of the student, the virtues-based approach to education argues that we all have an essence or being (Hartman, 2006). Therefore, the key role of the educator is to provide the context for students to reflect on and draw out their own character (Eriksen et al., 2019) as they attempt to comprehend the world and their relationship with it. Harvey’s provocative reflections “sow the seeds” of what most of us today will recognize as student-centered learning or learner-centered teaching (Weimer, 2002; Wright, 2011).
Seen in this light, Harvey’s dramatic classroom exits might be more about providing a disruptive context for encouraging students to draw out and interrogate their own character. Contemporary educators have established a variety of less controversial pedagogical techniques for enabling students to explore their being. Making the break with the classroom and putting students into “crucible moment” situations such as physical challenges provide one such opportunity (Byrne et al., 2018). Then there is the possibility presented by aesthetic experiences such as art for engaging the whole person in potentially transformational experiences (Hibbert et al., 2018). Reflection journals also offer personal space for students to explore their own character (Eriksen et al., 2019).
Whatever the approach, there seems to be a range of potential pedagogical experiences management educators can employ for encouraging students to reflect and develop their being. Rather than taking a literal interpretation of Harvey’s Learning To Not Teach as a sign that management educators should head for the exit door and leave learning matters to students themselves, we therefore see the piece as providing a call for a student-centered and virtues-based education which recognizes the dignity and humanity of all of our students. Furthermore, we see it as providing underlying encouragement of disciplined experimentation in the teaching context to provide students with parameters in which they might better understand themselves and their shared humanity. For both these reasons, Harvey’s message is timeless and contains pedagogical implications for management educators of all levels of experience.
Publishing Provocations for Management Education in the 21st Century
During the Associate Editorial team’s voting on the Lasting Impact Award, one of the members asked: “as good as the thoughts he [Harvey] shares in the paper are, would it get published as is today?” The answer is almost certainly no. The paper does not conform to modern standards around scholarly evidence. It presents a series of contentious opinions with precious little supporting material from third party sources. If the paper made it past the Editorial desk, it would almost certainly fail at the hands of reviewers.
That said, there is a greater question around whether it should be possible to publish such provocations? To put up a question as contentious as that which Harvey might pose: in a world where Artificial Intelligence threatens our profession (Rivers & Holland, 2022), and where high-profile cases of alleged academic fraud occur (Yang, 2023), might it be that scholarship which comes from the heart remains our field’s best antidote to irrelevance?
Furthermore, in a management education field which has historically taken pride in publishing hard-hitting polemics on its ambitions and approaches (e.g., Bennis & O’Toole, 2005; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Porter & McKibben, 1988; Snyder, 2014), there appears a relative paucity of debate in the last half decade around who we are and what we might become as a profession. Perhaps this situation reflects an academic group wearied by the pandemic and normal service will eventually resume? But perhaps it is also reflective of a publishing landscape that doesn’t deliver formats conducive to testing the waters of debate? It is notable that much of Harvey’s work was published in books. Might our big ideas in management education now be better suited to podcasts and other non-traditional forms of media? If there is to be a home in traditional outlets for exploring provocative themes, then how can our journals be better shaped to provide a home for contentious ideas and debate?
In penning this guest piece on Harvey’s article, we are certainly grateful the 1979 JME editor saw this piece as a publishable scholarly work. Whether the piece should be publishable today is a question for others to decide. Our guess is that Jerry Harvey would sit back and enjoy learning from the discussion.
