Extra: Alice Temnick on Teaching, Learning, and Adam Smith's Education

critical reading economic education classics


Students often need guidance. Great teachers are great guides. Nancy Vander Veer listens in and shares what she learned. You're next!
What makes a great learner? What makes a great teacher? In this discussion with Great Antidote host Juliette Sellgren, Alice Temnick discusses learning and teaching through the lens of Adam Smith’s life as well as her own experiences in the classroom. Temnick is a teacher of IB Economics at the United Nations International School in Manhattan and an education consultant with Liberty Fund’s AdamSmithWorks and Econlib.


Listening to Alice Temnick, it’s evident that she has thought deeply about successes and failures in her own teaching. She’s spent years refining her craft and her joy in her subject matter and the relationships she builds with students shines in this episode. 

Like most people, I have strong memories of good and bad experiences in schools: an inspiring middle school math teacher who spread pure joy in our regular algebra classes and in math competition team meetings. There was also an elementary teacher who chastised me in front of the class for using quotation marks “before we’d learned them, that isn’t allowed” and made me rewrite a whole story without them.


Of course, much of our deepest learning takes place beyond a school or university. The best teachers equip students for this. They demonstrate their delight in their chosen subject, a habit of mind that prioritized exploration of ideas, and a deep curiosity in and outside of their subject. Temnick's opening advice to a new generation shows this:

…it's about reading deeply and reading when you become interested in the topic, not putting it off and thinking, “Hey, down the road, I'm going to have more time to explore this. I'll buy a couple of books and put 'em on my shelf and get to that later.” It's to embrace that feeling of when something captures you so much that it's bothering you, you want to fit this new idea into what is your current set of knowledge. And my, I guess, suggestion is to go down that rabbit hole at the time that you have that energy and that interest. Have multiple books going at once. Borrow books, pay library fines, ask people for the referrals. Do book clubs, even personal one-on-one book clubs. And when you give a book to someone else to want to talk about it, be specific about, “Hey, in this chapter 13 or in this idea.” And I guess it's just to encourage that the habit of reading should form around your excitement and your interests, not just the prescribed reading and such that we all do through education.

Alice Temnick’s model for this kind of thinking about auto-didacticism is Adam Smith. Smith was encouraged by some great teachers, including Francis Hutcheson, but he also had a tough time during his scholarship at Oxford and a discouraging post-university job search. Rotten teachers and fallow periods did not stop him from his own exploration in the world of ideas, and led to an extraordinarily productive period as a lecturer in moral philosophy and later an author of world-changing books. Learning, for both Alice and Adam, is and was something self-directed.

From his own mixed experience as a student and teacher, Smith understood the role of educational institutions as a helpful, but neither necessary nor sufficient condition to learning. However, he knew that a good teacher, well-practiced in their craft, could attract good students.  He discussed this in Volume 2 of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other. Where the masters, however, really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs. No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given.

Notice that Smith is not dismissing the importance of institutional education here. Students often need guidance. Great teachers are great guides. 

Want to go down a rabbit hole based on this post?
Epictetus, Online Library of Liberty (if it’s good reading for Smith, it’s good enough for us!)
Jon Murphy’s Adam Smith Also Teaches Good Teaching, Jon Murphy, AdamSmithWorks
Shal Marriott's How Professor Smith Helped Me Survive my Undergraduate Degree, AdamSmithWorks
Walter Donway’s When Smith Swapped A Future as A Clergyman for Economics, Philosophy, and Social Psychology, AdamSmithWorks
Maria Pia Paganelli’s A Grand Tour with Adam Smith, Econlib
Russ Roberts, Smith Lessons: What I've Learned from Adam and Vernon, EconTalk

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