Teach(Ed) is a biweekly column by Oscar Heller where he discusses teaching and being taught.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a student in some way. I’ve had at least sixteen first days of school. Every year, August brings a reluctant photo shoot where I try earnestly to smile so my mom can look fondly back at the photos. I feel too exposed in front of that unblinking void at the top right corner of her phone. I’m used to being behind stuff, not in front of it.
And so the performance begins. Standing in front of the world, writers interpret their surroundings, and offer me some made-up signifier often in the form of an -ism whose referent decays and decays and decays until it ceases to exist at all. And here I am, in a room by myself, waiting until enough time has passed for them to identify and deploy new -isms while my own present morphs unrelentingly into the future. I exist behind things, both in space and time.
That leaves me with two important questions: (1) where the fuck am I, here and now? And (2) what the fuck is going on, here and now? These are the questions that I imagine most Humanities students and academics—at least the good ones—are trying to answer in nicer words after they entangle themselves with these authors and their –isms.
The problem is that before these questions are even posed, questions that are really just roundabout ways of asking how to live, many have already made up their minds. And not by choice. Let’s use Patrick P. Pseudonym as an example. He’s an average American WASP. Age 15. Lives somewhere like Greenwich, Connecticut or Evanston, Illinois. The perfect consumer. Pat is well-off as a kid, and because he sees life as a series of linearly organized, relatively reachable goals (i.e. go to school, maybe play a sport or two, get a degree in something economically relevant, start a family, ad infinitum), he has no reason to ever leave his own world. He may leave it physically, but never morally. By the time he’s a junior in high school, Pat decides he wants to be a doctor or engineer or computer scientist or something else where he can earn enough money so that he too, one day, can live and breathe and die in a suburban town. This is not to say that all “Pats” of the world will inevitably become doctors or engineers or computer scientists nor is it to say that anyone already in one of those fields—or any STEM career, for that matter—was originally a “Pat.” The point is that, for people like him, there exists an almost instinctive tendency to preserve things as they are. And, therefore, a proclivity for the more scientific or objective careers that can circumvent the one question the humanities are built around and the one people like Pat tend to avoid at all costs: why?
But back to our story. Because Pat’s current state of affairs poses no challenges to him personally, he never stops to look around and think about the operation of things on a meta level; he’s never taken out of himself, out of his infinitesimally small yet supremely important universe. He’s exactly what capital-T “They”—the advertisers, the corporations, the markets—want him to be: a nearsighted kid with an “if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” kind of attitude and money to spend.
Maybe out of boredom, but more so because he’s grown accustomed to it, Pat will devote his adolescence to a pursuit of instant gratification. At 18, he’ll join a frat filled with other Pats at some prestigious university and drink consistently enough that his liver will be toast by the time he’s 30. Around the same time, he’ll pick up a vaping habit that’ll send him to the hospital with a collapsed lung after he tries to make that coveted morning buzz last a little longer. And he’ll probably be knee-deep in a porn addiction, all the while thinking he’s free.
The Pats of the world don’t know that they exist behind stuff; that all people, whether they like it or not, are instructed and directed and guided in some way by something that can be as obvious as a book or as invisible and amorphous as a cultural ethos. We lead, we follow. Everyone teaches, everyone is taught. The only question is what.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
