Without Lifting A Finger

Had to be in the area for a PD. Anyway, got there early, stopped at a Bucks, and looked around a little bit. Hollywood Pres is close to the freeway and a good campground for a few. Stories they could tell. *                           

Another of the "autos." He's gone off to college and is also teaching elementary school. *** Re his teaching experience: What it is that makes the competent teacher is not clear. Some produced an effect by their quiet manner, others by their nervousness; some seemed to magnetise the children, others beat them; some imposed on them by their age or their manly appearance, etc. The women worked as women, i.e. through a half-forgotten tradition of a past matriarchate. John was not competent. He looked too young and was only just nineteen; he was skeptical about the methods employed and everything else; with all his seriousness he was playful and boyish. The whole matter to him was only an employment by the way, for he was ambitious and wished to advance, but did not know in which direction. Re writing and talent: John was seized with a craze for writing verse but could not. The gift must be born with one, he thought, and inspiration descend all of a sudden, as i...

Ok, I found the quote because I was reviewing quotation mark usage. I uncovered a bit of the author, Henry Steele Commager. Then I got interested in the context of the quote. Here's a little bit of that (the part quoted in an early post is highlighted):      What is the explanation of what must be called the mucker pose in so much of higher education in America--of its anti-academic and anti-intellectual character? It is twofold. First is the widespread illusion that education is something that goes on in the classroom, something that comes by way of a "course" that a professor "gives" and a student " takes." This leads to the natural conclusion that when the classroom is closed, the process of education is over, and that the professor might as well go home and tend to his garden, the student might as well go to the Union and watch television. It is no exaggeration to say that if all lectures were abandoned, Oxford and Cambridge would go on much as...

Was flipping through An American Rhetoric by William W. Watts. Found this example of using quotation marks "to call attention to irony." Don't know who Henry Steele Commanger is, but I liked it (the entire entry is worth typing out). Seems to go against the current stream. b. First is the widespread illusion that education is something that goes on in the classroom, something that comes by way of a "course" that a professor "gives" and a student "takes." --Henry Steele Commager, "Is Ivy Necessary?" Saturday Review (quotation marks here are the equivalent of a mildly ironic so-called and make that overworked word unnecessary)

Among School Children I I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and histories, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way — the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. II I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy — Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. III And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t’other there And wonder if she stood so at that age — For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler’s heritage — And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before m...

From Emile :      Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts.

     Man is born to suffer; pain is the means of his preservation. His childhood is happy, knowing only pain of the body. These bodily sufferings are much less cruel, much less painful, than other forms of suffering, and they rarely lead to self-destruction. It is not the twinges of gout which make a man kill himself, it is mental suffering that leads to despair. We pity the sufferings of childhood; we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are of our own making.

Probably not too far off the mark: Next, they switched to the usual shop talk of European teachers abroad, sighing and shaking heads over the "typical American college student" who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get eventually a remunerative job.

At least in his early years Holderlin is making a living as a tutor. I believe (I've not read a full biography, so I'm garnering it from his letters): a live-in tutor. Thus some fragmentary thoughts on education (at least in this letter he is interacting with Rousseau pretty much throughout): I must waken his humanity But Rousseau is wrong in patiently waiting for humanity to awaken in the child But I would never ask the child whether he had remembered what had been said, for the point is not history itself but its influence on the heart So long as geography is not, as it usually is, reduced to something dead and papery; so long as the maps are enlivened with suitably adapted travel accounts If the child can come to notice day by day that arithmetic is part and parcel of many useful activities he will very likely take pleasure in doing it To teach a child a language systematically will be very difficult if it is to occur before the child is even capable of working towa...

          What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes from Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student's heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them rise to a higher realm. So to speak. *** Nice, if untenable. Something only a teacher could wish for.