Howard Burton - The Consolations of History: A Conversation with Teofilo Ruiz

Teofilo Ruiz is a teacher.

Notwithstanding all the trappings of academic successthe PhD from Princeton, the prestigious fellowships, the National Humanities Medal, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesthat is, quite simply, how Teo regards himself.

The outside world might well view him as a highly-regarded professional historian who has written numerous scholarly articles and books on a wide variety of social and cultural practices of late medieval and early modern Spain.

But when you talk to Teo, it is always the teacher who comes to the fore. And it was that way, it seems, from the very beginning, instilled in him from his boyhood days in Cuba.

I wanted to teach: thats what I wanted to do. I come from a family of teachers. All my aunts, nine of them, were teachers. I never thought of becoming a scholar or writing books or anything like that: I wanted to be a teacher. I took a history major, but it could have been a philosophy majorI had that as a minor.

When people ask me, What do you do? I never tell them that I write books. I tell them that Im a teacherthat is what I love to do. Im coming to the end of it now, but I still love it.

Why? What is it about teaching that Teo finds so captivating?

Part of it is clearly the performance itself, the ability to captivate and intrigue. When reminiscing about one of his mentors, the famed Princeton cultural historian Carl Schorske, Teo seemed immediately transported back to graduate school.

Carl Schorske is the best teacher I have ever seen in my life. He was incredibly keen on teaching undergraduates. It was a performance: he had music behind him and images. It was so elegant and beautiful that you were utterly seduced by it.

Teo, too, freely admits that he loves to perform in front of a classroom, that the experience itself impassions and inspires him to rhetorical heights. But it is more than just entertainment, of course. At its heart, teaching is about communicating values.

I always say to them, Dont think of yourself as the final product of an evolutionary and historical process that culminates with you.

These people living in the first or fifth century in India or China, or in the 12th or 16th century in France or Spain, were facing issues not so different from the ones that you may be facing. Here is how they tried to get through their lives and their difficult periods.

Their answers are not always right. They may have consequences that lead to awful things. But these are people who are alive.

Are alive? I remember thinking to myself. The present tense? A slip of the tongue? Not at all, as it turned out.

This is something that I said too in The Terror of History. I want to convey to my students the fact that many of these people who wrote, or who lived, or who were peasants in a villagewhich I had tried to at least name, to bring them back to lifeare as alive as many of us, because they live on in our memory and our consciousness, because we read them, because we are moved by the way they wrote, because we adore the music they wrote or the paintings they made.

These are not cultural products that you somehow own, these are cultural products that serve as a link to all humans who lived before you. You must understand that these wonderful, cultural trophies, as Walter Benjamin once said, are always paid with a terrible, terrible price.

Take The Industrial Revolution: this unique moment in which places like England and the Netherlands, then Germany and Francecatapult into great, global dominance, a dominance that is paid for by their workers in those satanic mills that Blake described so vividly

An important message, to be sure. But are we learning? Are we remembering? Are the diligent efforts of Teo and his like-minded colleagues bearing fruit?

There are definitely moments when Teo himself seems to have lost hope.

I am actually not unhappy to be the age that I am. I love my undergraduates. I teach because I also love the students: there is something that happens in the classroomnot always, but sometimesthere is a moment of recognition, the moment when a life is transformed.

But I am glad that I am the age that I am, when the end is near, both of my teaching and of my life, because I think that for the first time we are teaching a generation that has completely grown up in a technologically-shaped world.

Its not that they dont know anything or that they are stupid. But they dont know the things I know, they dont have the same frames of reference that I have, they dont really share a common culture with me.

They know other things that I do not know. Am I being antiquarian? Am I being an ultra-reactionary who still thinks that there is value to knowing poetry or knowing history?

Behold the jaded and despondent professor, the genteel, old-fashioned communicator who fears he can no longer deeply connect with todays undergraduates.

But then, suddenly, the old teacher bounces back, chattering excitedly about next weeks lecture to seventh-grade teachers on medieval history as part of the innovative California History-Social Science Project, or his rewarding interaction with the young-adult writer Avi.

He saw one of my recorded lectures, and got the idea of writing a novel about an English boy in 1381 during the peasant uprising. And he wrote to me and said that he was writing this young-adult fiction book and asked if I would like to take a look at the final product.

He sent it to me and it was pretty accurate. I made some tiny fixes here and there, and he ended up dedicating the book to me. Its called Crispin: The Cross of Lead and it won the 2003 Newbery Medal for childrens literature. So thats something that Im very proud of.

There is no quit in Teacher Teo.