Panegyric for Michael Webber - 3
Eric Michael Webber, Dean Emeritus
photo courtesy Alexandra Grimshaw
24 June 2006
Contribution to education
Michael made a significant contribution to education. The list of positions he occupied is too long to mention here: if one said that he taught music, theology, ethics, comparative religion and philosophy in his roles as chaplain, teacher, lecturer at the Advanced College and University and at Adult Education centres in South Africa and in Tasmania, perhaps that would give an idea of the range of his undertakings.
As Dean, one of his responsibilities was to teach Religious Education at Hutchins and at Collegiate to the senior boys and girls. Janet Waters, one of his old students, wrote to me the other day and said:
Your father will always be, to me, “The Dean”, and was the teacher I admired and respected most from my school days. His keen mind and kind, generous spirit provided so many of us with a model towards which we could strive.
Jenny Kay popped in to see the family on Friday and said:
Until I was taught by your father, I thought that there was only ever one way of doing and seeing things. He showed me that there was more than one way of seeing the world.
Michael would have appreciated that. In a note he wrote in 1972 he said:
This in part explains his resignation in 1971. In this year the TCAE was opened and Michael established a sub-department in Studies in Religion to prepare teachers to teach the subject in both state and private schools. In many ways this was a just reward for an enormous volume of work he had put in to developing Religious Studies syllabuses for school children for Years 10, 11 and 12, having failed in earlier attempts to have the subject taught in primary schools. The subject, whose syllabuses he had a major hand in shaping, continues to grow in popularity, despite the shrinking of other subjects in the general area of Humanities.
Michael saw the move to the TCAE as an extension of his ministry, though he was aware that many others saw it as a dereliction of it. He found the business of preparing his notes and the process of teaching immensely rewarding, refreshing and fruitful. In an address given at the Cathedral for his Golden Jubilee in 1995 he noted:
No longer protected by a title or rank I came in direct contact with sharp minds and unfettered opinions of young adults - and with colleagues who were definitely not part of the ecclesiastical structures!
In the process of educating his students he advanced his own thinking. In his Jubilee address he said:
We have to acknowledge, especially if we have been privileged to come into contact with non-Christian religions, cultures and civilisations, that as religion has shaped peoples and cultures, even so people and cultures will shape their religion.
It is not only Pilate, then, who needs to ask “What is truth?”
On 5 May 1998, Michael gave the inaugural “Webber Lecture” at the Hutchins School, the first in an annual series of lectures named in his honour. The lecture gave glimpses about his notion of education:
We shall find that guided discussion, and mental analysis will have an essential place in the consideration or examination of the ethical aspects of such things as advertising, business methods, the various controls which limit the freedoms we think we have, insurance, social welfare, “gaydom”, citizens’ rights and responsibilities - there seems to be no end to the list.
Nor is there, and that is what makes ethics so interesting. What’s more, no-one can really be considered educated who takes no intelligent interest in such matters. School provides opportunities for developing a moral awareness which, for many, might never come again.
Later in the lecture, we sense his disappointment about various aspects of his time at the TCAE and University. He spoke of his education in ethics in theological college days and the assumption that Christian ethics included as an integral element, a practical concern for others. He continues:
Later acquaintance with ethics in a different sort of academic environment tended to give the impression that, though the lectures contained correct, up-to-the minute thoughts about theoretical morality, they were not expected to infect our personal behaviour unduly! That surprised and disappointed me.
Here, I believe, is the secret to Michael’s success as a teacher. What he taught, he lived and exemplified. He was a man of great integrity and his students knew it and loved him for it. At the time he first taught at the TCAE he was a man in his late 50’s who not only knew his books, but who had a vast experience of life. He was able to dispense his distilled wisdom not only to his students, but also, I have heard, to many of his colleagues. As he said in his lecture at Hutchins:
We are not into the promotion of the “if it feels good, it is good” understanding of morality. We all need good examples to copy, and we have it on excellent authority that if only we can see the good (and that implies recognising and understanding it), then we shall follow it. That’s a nice thought to hold on to, because it provides at least one reason for optimism. And optimism is what we need in a world-scene which gives increasing reason for despondency and despair.