The good teacher...

The good teacher is a man or woman of exceptionally wide and lively intellectual interests. It is useless to think of teaching as a business, like banking or insurance: to learn the necessary quota of rules and facts, to apply them day by day as the bank-manager applies his, to go home in the evening and sink into a routine of local gossip and middle-brow relaxation (radio, TV, the newspaper, and the detective-story), to pride oneself on being an average citizen, indistinguishable from the dentist and the superintendent of the gas-works -- and then to hope to stimulate young and active minds. Teachers in schools and colleges must see more, think more, and understand more than the average man and woman of the society in which they live. This does not only mean that have a better command of language and know special subjects, such as Spanish literature and marine biology, which are closed to others. It means they must know more about the world, have wider interests, keep a more active enthusiasm for the problems of the mind and the inexhaustible pleasures of art, have a keener taste even for some of the superficial enjoyments of life -- yes, and spend the whole of their career widening the horizons of their spirit. Most people, as we see, stop growing between thirty and forty. They "settle down" -- a phrase which implies stagnation -- or at the utmost they "coast along," using their acquired momentum, applying no more energy, and gradually slowing down to a stop. No teacher should dream of doing this. His job is understanding a large and important area of the world's activity and achievement and making it viable for the young. He should expect to understand more and more of its as his years go by.

Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching, pp. 48-49

Academia in 1961

In June 1961 Eugene Rose wrote the following letter to his parents explaining why he was abandoning the world of higher education:

Dear Parents,

A hot day -- too much like summer for San Francisco.  I finally finished the thesis and turned it in last Friday, but they don't get around to sending out the degrees until September, for some reason.  For the time being I'm still involved in Chinese things, as I'm helping my former Chinese professor [Prof. G. Ming Shen] translate an article [from Chinese] on Chinese philosophy for a philosophical journal.  The hypocrisy of the academic world is nowhere more evident than in his case.  He knows more about Chinese philosophy than probably anyone else in the country, and studied with real Chinese philosophers and sages in China; but he can't get a job in any college here because he doesn't have degrees from American colleges, and because he isn't a fast talker - he's too honest, in short.

It's true that I chose the academic life in the first place, because God gave me a mind to serve Him with, and the academic world is where the mind is supposed to be used.  But after eight or nine years I know well enough what goes on in the universities.  The mind is respected only by a few of the "old fashioned" professors, who will soon have died out.  For the rest, it's a matter of making money; getting a secure place in life -- and using the mind as a kind of toy, doing clever tricks with it and getting paid for it, like circus clowns. The love of truth has vanished from people today; those who have minds have to prostitute their talents to get along.  I find this difficult to do, because I have too great a love of truth,  The academic world for me is just another job; but I am not going to make myself a slave to it.  I am not serving God in the academic world; I am just making a living.  If I am going to serve God in this world, and so keep from making my life a total failure, I will have to do it outside the academic world.  I have some money saved up, and the promise of some more by doing a little work, so I should be able to live frugally for a year doing what my conscience tells me I should do -- to write a book on the spiritual condition of man today, about which, by God's grace, I have some knowledge.  The book* will probably not sell, because people would rather forget about the things I am going to say; they would rather make money than worship God.

It is true that this is a mixed up generation.  The only thing wrong with me is that I am NOT mixed up, I know only too well what the duty of man is: to worship God and His Son and to prepare for the life of the world to come, NOT to make ourselves  happy and comfortable in this world by exploiting our fellow man and forgetting about God and His Kingdom.

If Christ were to walk in this world today, do you know what would happen to Him?  He would be placed in a mental institution and given psycho-therapy, just as would the saints.  The world would crucify Him today just as it did 2000 years ago, for the world has not learned a thing, except more devious forms of hypocrisy.  And what would happen, if, in one of my classes at the university, I would one day tell my students that all the learning of this world is of no importance beside the duty of worshipping God, accepting the truth -- but men hate the truth, and that is why they would gladly crucify Christ again if he came amidst them.

I am a Christian, and I am going to try to be an honest Christian.  Christ told s to give all our money away and follow Him.  I am very far from doing this. But I am going to try to take no more money than I need to live on; if I can earn this by working a year or two at a time in a university, all right.  But the rest of my time I am going to try to serve God with the talents He has given me.  This year I have the chance to do this, so I shall do it.  My professor, being a Russian [the love of God seems to be more deeply imbedded in the Russians than in other peoples] has not tried to talk me out of leaving the academic world for a year; he knows too well that the love of truth, the love of God, is infinitely more important than the love of security, of money, of fame.

I can only follow my conscience; I cannot be false to myself.

Love,

Eugene

Liturgy, Theology, and Asceticism

“Christianity involves liturgy, theology, and asceticism the way a pancake involves flour, milk and eggs: They are ingredients to the end result. Leave one out and you don’t have exactly the same thing any more.”  David W. Fagerberg

How much education do you need to understand this sentence?

"When he found himself immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had lately been so happy, disporting himself as if he had bought up every road in England, he flung himself at full length on the floor, and shed bitter tears, and abandoned himself to dark despair."

According to the "Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula", 30 years of education is required.
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Where did it come from?  The classic children's book, The Wind in the Willows.   

Words and Life

"To live without speaking is better than to speak without living. For the former who lives rightly does good even by his silence, but the latter does no good even when he speaks. When words and life correspond to one another they are together the whole of divine philosophy."  Isidore of Pelusium

The Loss of Faith and Poetry in the West

Not only was faith lost in the West, but also poetry, which in the absence of living convictions became transformed into a barren amusement; and the more exclusively poetry sought imagined pleasure alone, the more tedious it became.

Only one serious thing was left to man, and that was industry. For man, the reality of existence survived only in his physical person. Industry rules the world without faith or poetry. In our time, it unites and divides people. It determines one’s fatherland; it delineates classes; it lies at the base of state structures; it moves nations; it declares war, makes peace, changes mores, gives direction to science, and determines the character of culture. Men bow down before it and erect temples to it. It is the real deity in which people sincerely believe and to which they submit. ~ Ivan Kireyevsky