NONFICTION - Oct. 17, 1993

TEACHING DEMOCRACY: A Professor’s Journal by John A. Minahan (Delphinium Books: $20; 182 pp.). Frank, a quiet but talented sophomore at Brown University, came to John Minahan’s office midway through a recent semester to complain, truculently, about his teacher’s course. Minahan, the author of this book and a Brown lecturer, was tolerant at first, but when Frank’s responses became knee-jerk, Minahan showed him the door. Minahan reports the encounter to show how unreachable some students can be, but the story cuts another way as well: you’d expect significantly more tolerance from a professor teaching a class entitled “Democracy and Education: Using the Personal Voice to Explore a Public Issue.” “Teaching Democracy” is an interesting book, using writings by Jefferson, Emerson, Du Bois, E. D. Hirsch and others to examine the ways in which education affects and defines democracy, but one comes away from it wondering why Minahan devoted so little class time to an exploration of the teacher’s authority. Frank resented, among other things, Minahan’s tendency to fill dead air with his own talk, but the author seems to miss Frank’s deepest point, that the class itself should be a living democracy: instead of suggesting that Frank try to run the class himself, or that the class vote to elect a new leader, Minahan labels Frank as callowly and narrowly obsessed with “privileged discourse.” Minahan dismisses that obsession--and it is that--far too lightly, very happy to question the presumptions underlying the work of the writers he teaches but much less happy to question his own presumptions about the teacher’s role in education.