The Teacher Problem

Every tradition that produced teachers also produced a literature warning about teachers, and the warnings did not come from outside. They were written by insiders, often by the most accomplished practitioners, and they are unusually specific. That the caution is internal rather than external is the fact worth sitting with.

The structural problem is not hard to see once stated. Transmission of a difficult skill requires someone who has it and someone who does not, which means an asymmetry of knowledge that cannot be verified by the person on the receiving end. The student cannot assess the teacher's attainment, because the capacity to assess it is the thing being taught. That gap is the vulnerability, and it is not removable by good intentions on either side.

The traditions responded with constraints on the teacher rather than warnings to the student, which was the right instinct. Vows of poverty removing the financial incentive. Rotation of authority. Requirements that a teacher remain a student of someone else. Prohibitions on claiming attainment. Structures under which the teacher was answerable to a body rather than to their own following. These were not moral exhortations. They were controls.

The controls degrade in a predictable order and reading the history you can watch it happen. Financial independence goes first, usually for defensible reasons. Then external accountability, because the teacher has outgrown the body that trained them. Then the prohibition on claiming attainment, which typically dissolves gradually rather than in a single moment. By the time the failure is visible from outside, the controls have been gone for a long time.

The contemporary situation removed all of them at once, without replacement, and mostly without noticing. A teacher now is frequently self-appointed, financially dependent on the size of their following, accountable to no institution, and free to make any claim about their own attainment. Every control the traditions found necessary is absent. It would be surprising if the results were good.

This is not an argument that teachers are unnecessary. The asymmetry that creates the vulnerability is real: some things genuinely cannot be learned from a text, and the traditions that insisted on transmission were not being obscurantist. It is an argument that the controls are load-bearing and that a teaching relationship without them should be assumed compromised until shown otherwise.

The usable markers, from the internal literature rather than from modern criticism, are consistent across traditions and quite practical. A teacher who makes leaving difficult. A teacher whose account of their own attainment cannot be checked by anyone. A teacher with no living teacher. A teacher whose income scales with devotion rather than with instruction. A teaching in which doubt about the teacher is itself framed as a symptom. That last one is the most reliable single indicator, and it is the one that most reliably appears late.

There is a mirror problem that gets less attention. The demand side is not innocent. A great deal of what looks like teacher malpractice is students insisting on being told what to do, resisting every attempt to hand responsibility back, and reliably abandoning any teacher who refuses the role. The traditions describe this too. The pressure to become an authority frequently comes from below.

Which is why the most consistent advice in the internal literature is not about choosing well. It is about the direction of travel. A teaching relationship should be making you less dependent over time, not more. If the trajectory is towards greater need for the teacher, something has gone wrong regardless of anyone's sincerity, and sincerity is not the variable to watch.

The traditions knew all of this and wrote it down plainly. The material is not hidden. It is simply not read by the people who most need it, which may be the oldest problem in the whole field.