The task of the modern educator

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1944

Masters of the culture

Moreover, we ourselves--many of us in the academy--have long since forgotten our main purpose is to teach: strictly to transmit what is already known, not as a sideline of our entrepreneurial R & D or as gurus of Change. We are neither geniuses nor apostles. We should be highly trained masters of the culture, in its variety of special respects. Unless we ourselves achieve this mastery, the chain of intellect cannot be forged in varieties of respect for unequals. How can we expect true disciples, in real disciplines, when we ourselves have never met a master, but only office managers and more less celebrated critics of whatever might be construed as reverence?

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

A science and art of limits

We are subjected to endless breakthroughs, by hosts of mini-charismatics, intruding on our private selves, demanding that we abolish them. Against these breakthroughs, and their celebrants, revolutionary and regressive, we might try to imagine a science and art of limits; our primal feeling, if only we could reconstruct it, must be for what we have long known is not to be done.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

The rudeness of the primitive

Our college-trained primitives have been charmed by the idea that rudeness of manner, speech and thought is criticism personified. They express not criticism but hostility to culture in any form. Their chorused obscenities and temper tantrums are the debased liturgical form taken, nowadays, by the high nineteenth-century religion of criticism, about which they have not the slightest knowledge. Only projects--inputs and outputs, quickly made--really interest them... Good manners are protective, against the thrust of those short-term, even instant, projects that are the bureaucratic version of the quest for experience.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

Not ourselves prophets

...[A] concealing transfer of privileged knowledge is the unchangeable work of teachers: being mere interpreters of interpreters, not ourselves prophets, we are authorized only by the greatness that has preceded us, from which we make knowledge our own.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

On being a true critic

Our academic institutions lack a presiding presence. Our expert devotions, endlessly critical, can never be commanding. We are stuck with our faith in criticism, only marginally different from popular versions of the endless expressional quest or liberated understandings. A true critic, I think, would be one who teaches in an institutional order critically opposed to the established ease of questioning. If we were true critics, then our work could not be taken up and laid down as it is, one enlightenment crowding another, and certainly we could never be hired for what we are not: each of us his own 'Perfesser,' at his piano, tinkling interminable blues for the masses of traumatized now gainfully employed in the cat house of intellect. These people are not clinically ill. They are the next worse thing: culturally disorganized.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973.

Why publish?

Why publish? That is a real question for all scholars of meanings; for all intellectuals, as well. The world is broken-through enough. With so many authors, who remains behind to read?

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

Inaugural post

Odds are this site will be short-lived. What seemed like a good idea one spring morning will likely fall by the wayside in coming days. But if it does survive, then let it be not a website but a worksite, a place for working out the teacherly vocation with fear and trembling.