Education, Teaching, and Prophets Theme Analysis

In the first paragraph of Ishmael, the narrator sees a newspaper ad asking for a student, immediately establishing the novel’s focus on education and the teacher-student relationship. And yet what also quickly becomes clear is that the novel is not just focusing on the importance of education, but rather critiquing how education is practiced in the modern world. After all, Ishmael is not a typical teacher. For one thing, he’s a super-intelligent ape. For another, he explicitly disagrees with the very notion of teaching—at least as we usually think of it.

Ishmael argues that society, which he calls the society of Takers (those who take the world’s resources and claim ownership over the planet) has become what it is in part because it too completely relies on prophets and sages: people who claim to have “master knowledge” of how to live, and spend their lives passing on this knowledge to their disciples. In contrast, Ishmael never passes on information to the narrator without also asking the narrator to weigh it carefully. Indeed, Ishmael rarely “passes on” information at all: instead he uses the “Socratic method” to conduct an open-ended conversation with the narrator. Under the terms of this conversation, the narrator is free to make up his own mind about Ishmael’s ideas.

In another sense, Ishmael’s teaching differs from that of a prophet’s insofar as he encourages the narrator to rely on his—the narrator’s—own wisdom, instinct, and knowledge. At many points in Ishmael, Ishmael asks the narrator a complicated question and the narrator realizes with amazement that he knows the answer already, but had been so trained to ignore his instincts that he at first assumes that he doesn’t know the answer. Ishmael’s goal, then, isn’t to pass on new wisdom to his disciples, but instead to remind his students of basic, common-sense knowledge of the way the world works—knowledge that, as he puts it, even a child knows.

Ishmael’s goal, then, isn’t to educate the narrator at all. Rather, he’s trying to get the narrator to “unlearn” the myths and stories with which his society has filled his head. At the end of the novel, it seems that the narrator has finally rejected Taker dogma, and is ready to live as a Leaver. Significantly, Ishmael isn’t present to guide the narrator in this quest: the narrator is on his own, free to pursue any course of action he pleases. In the end, Ishmael suggests, the best teachers aim to “push” their students to the point where the students don’t need – or can’t have – a teacher at all, and are ready to face the world for themselves. Echoing that philosophy, it is left up to us to decide whether the narrator—or we, the readers—have reached this point by the end of the novel.