Teaching and learning - All about Drucker

Information Outlook, April, 2002 by Bruce Rosenstein

Peter Drucker's greatest legacy beyond his writings on management may be his work as a teacher and a writer about the twin worlds of teaching and learning.

The keynote speaker at the 2002 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Los Angeles this June has taught in various universities for more than 50 years. Since 1971, he has been a professor at the school now named for him, The Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at the Claremont Graduate University in California.

A number of his books and articles discuss his views on education at all levels. He gives many examples from his own teaching, and his observations of other teachers. He is now the star attraction for an e-learning company, Corpedia (www.corpedia.com), with the Peter F. Drucker Executive Management Series.

In an interview last year, I asked Drucker what made this series different and unique. He replied, "...we spent endless hours in developing the format that fits the new medium. Most of the learning material now offered seems to me to be little different from an ordinary college course ... I learned more than 60 years ago that a new medium needs not only a new message (I learned that from my friend Marshall McLuhan) but even more a new and different format... In the Corpedia learning devices we built in a number of features that make the online experience distinct and different."

Drucker constantly prods his readers to think about such questions as "What makes an educated person?" or "How do I learn? Am I a reader or listener?" He also hammers home the message that no matter how much education you possess, learning is a lifetime affair.

The implications for SLA members are clear. Many of us are involved in teaching and other forms of instruction and often we are encouraged to think of our workplaces as "learning organizations." Some of us work in companies that sponsor their own in-house "universities."

In his book Managing For The Future, Drucker writes of the benefits of teaching for knowledge workers: "...knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach. The best way to improve the productivity of the star salesperson is for him or her to present 'the secrets of my success' at a sales convention. The best way for the surgeon to improve his or her performance is to give a talk about it at the county medical society... It is often being said that in the information age every enterprise has to become a learning institution. It also has to become a teaching institution."

In a wonderful chapter from his 1978 memoirs, Adventures of a Bystander (reissued in 1998 with a new preface), Drucker lavishes special praise on Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy, his fourth grade teachers in Vienna. He describes in detail what he learned from them, and what he didn't. (He didn't learn good handwriting or the skills of shop class, but admits it was his fault, not theirs.)

He describes the dancer Martha Graham, a colleague at Bennington College in Vermont, where he taught during the 1940s, as "a teacher of extraordinary power...equally effective with both beginners and masters, and taught both exactly the same way."

Another chapter describes two of the most famous teachers of the 20th century, both of whom were longtime friends of his, well before they became stars: R. Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan.

In the chapter on Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy, he observes, "Teaching is a gift. One is born with it, the way the Beethovens and Rubens and Einsteins were born with their gifts. Teaching is personality, rather than skill or practice."

Put Drucker high on the list of born teachers.

Bruce Rosenstein is a librarian at USA TODAY and an adjunct professor at The Catholic University School of Library and Information Science in Washington, DC. He can be reached at brosenstein@usatoday.com.

Selected Bibliography:

Adventures of a Bystander (John Wiley & Sons, 1998)

The Essential Drucker (HarperCollins, 2001)

Management Challenges for the 21st Century (HarperBusiness, 1999; 2001 paperback)

Managing For the Future (Truman Talley Books/Plume, 1993 paperback edition)

Post-Capitalist Society (HarperBusiness, 1994 paperback edition)