"In my fifty years of teaching I have taught certainly
more than a thousand pupils. Though I had to do it in order to make a
living, I must confess that I was a passionate teacher, and the satisfaction
of giving to beginners as much as possible of my own knowledge was probably
a greater reward that the actual fee I received. A teacher cannot help
a student to invent many and beautiful themes, nor can he produce expressiveness
or profundity. Instead, he can teach structural correctness and the requirements
of continuity. A true teacher must be a model of his pupils; he must possess
the ability to achieve several times what he demands of a pupil once.
Here, at the University of California at Los Angeles, I had not too often
the opportunity of teaching the fine points of our art. Most of my students
took only the one year of composition which the curriculum prescribed
and only few remained for advanced studies. In spite of the short teaching
period, and though most of the students did not possess creative talent
nor an adequate knowledge of the master works, I succeeded in having every
one of them compose a Rondo. One might perhaps understand that I must
complain about teachers who teach their students nothing but the peculiarities
of a certain style. Much harm has been done to an entire generation of
high-talented American composers. It will probably require another generation
of honest and profound instruction to repair this damage."
(Arnold Schönberg, "The Task of the Teacher," 1950)
