Sukkot and a methodology for teaching

For my pleasure and curiosity I’m currently reading the Analytical Didactic of Comenius, this being an English translation of the tenth chapter of Johann Amos Komensky’s Linguarum methodus novissima. This fascinating work is a 17^th century treatise on pedagogy. Much of it seems laboured and obvious to us today but, in its time, it was quite revolutionary. We take it for granted today that children benefit from learning from books with illustrations that relate to the text, but this was a radical innovation when he proposed it.

What does this all have to do with Pirkei Avot?

We do not have a Mishnaic teaching manual as such; nor have the rabbis of old sat down and compiled a lengthy treatise on teaching methods. That does not mean that the subject has been ignored. As early as the reign of King Solomon it was accepted that one had to teach a child al pi darko (“in accordance with his derech [the direction that he needs]”: Mishlei 22:6). There is of course much more. Avot contains many pieces of advice and guidance for teachers and their talmidim. Thus we learn of the importance of, for example, expressing oneself in terms that can be clearly understood on a first hearing (2:5), asking questions that are relevant and giving answers that are appropriate (5:9), not being an irascible teacher (2:6), taking care to retain one’s learning (3:9), citing one’s sources (6:6) and so on.

Comenius sets out (at para.46) the following fundamentals of teaching. He writes:

Let us teach and learn:

The few before the many;
The brief before the long;
The simple before the complex;
The general before the particular;
The nearer before the more remote;
The regular before the irregular (or the analogous before the anomalous).

With the festival of Sukkot soon to be upon us, if we open the Babylonian Talmud at the very beginning of masechet Sukkah we will find that it commences with a discussion of teaching methodology. Both the covering of a sukkah and the cross-beam at the top of the entrance to an alley are invalid if more than 20 amot high, yet in the case of a sukkah the gemara teaches “it is invalid” while in the case of the cross-beam the gemara teaches “lower it”.

Why? The text offers two plausible reasons, each of which teaches something different in its own right.  One is that the mishnah teaches “invalid” when there are many reasons why the sukkah might be validated, but “lower it” when remedies for the excessive height are so few. We can see from this that the compilers of the Talmud, without stating general theories of education, were quite au fait with the techniques of teaching “the few before the many”, “the brief before the long”, and so on.

Later in the same chapter (Sukkah 11a) we find Comenius’s principles turned on their heads, for maximum teaching effect. Thus a klal gadol, a general principle, may appear at the end of a list of examples rather than at their head: this technique has great didactic efficacy when students are pushed to find cases that fall within the klal but which are not already specified.

Taken as a whole, it seems to me that, while Comenius’s Didactic neatly summarises a number of significant principles of teaching, they can be found in one form or another in the Talmud, in mishnayot—and in particular in Pirkei Avot. 

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