The man, the myth, the legend.

Stephen Colbert is an excellent teacher. Not the man himself, necessarily, but the character known as Stephen Colbert, who until recently was the host of The Colbert Report. That character is the embodiment of what a teacher can be.

The character Colbert brought to television on a nightly basis for nearly a decade had many traits, but perhaps the most prominent among them was his largeness. He was large in everything he did, from his espousing of opinions so extremely right-wing as to be ludicrous even to those who align with the right, to his physicality and enthusiasm for performing. When he entered the studio, to the raucous applause and chanting of his live audience, the message was clear- he was going to bring his A-game, and it was your role simply to take in the spectacle. Along the way, if you learned something, it was because you were engaged fully in the decoding of his true message, making connections to your own beliefs, and asking questions about the realities of the things upon which he reported.

The genius of Colbert’s reporting style is that it forces audiences to fully engage to see through the veneer of ignorance.

In short, this character asked you not simply to listen and believe, but to listen and analyze. Seek the truth through the blatant lies, and form opinions based not on what you heard, but what wasn’t said.

He was simultaneously deity and fool, demagogue and common man. He feigned ignorance to elicit the responses he needed out of his guests, he debased himself to make less popular groups appear more sympathetic, and he ultimately reflected our worst fears and anxieties, in an effort to ask us to confront them.

At this point, you may be asking yourself what this powerhouse of a performer and political satirist can offer the average educator. For me, emulating Colbert’s characterization offers three basic guidelines for effective education:

1.

First, educators should not be afraid to approach topics with blind enthusiasm, and should similarly not be afraid to appear a fool for doing so. Energy is infectious, humor is universally appreciated, and students resonate with honesty no matter their age or ability.

Colbert is proud of his passions, and doesn’t mind admitting that they’re silly.

2.

Second, educators should take any side of an argument necessary in order to get students thinking for themselves. A good classroom is about developing discussion and argument techniques and structures in order to force students to think critically about their content areas.

3.

Finally, educators should try to avoid simply giving information to their students. This is not to say Colbert’s level of obfuscation and almost impossibly sincere sarcasm is appropriate for most classroom environments, but rather that the genius of the Report was in its ability to encode its true points in such a way as to allow general audiences to decode them. In that act of decoding, more meaning is generated than in the simple information dump seen on traditional news shows, or even in the tongue-in-cheek finger wagging of the Daily Show.