teachers, books, faith--Montaigne

Naturally teachers will be expected to have at least an acquaintance with all the works they teach, hopefully a thorough understanding and interest moreover, but at least an open and fertile mind if coming to it, like their students, for the first time. It is the person that is essential, though, not the books they know, when we are discussing the kind of teacher I want, and want to be. Let us make that clear: despite the importance of books to the new schooling, we are concerned with developing good people, not literary critics only, and so the role models, the teachers, must foremost be interesting people themselves. It is just that books are an invaluable repository of the eternal part of just such interesting people who have lived throughout history—proving it is possible and giving us good cheer. God rest ye merry gentlemen; we must read some of the Bible, old and new, in various translations. To show the variety in translation, the vicissitudes in the history of its composition, the interpretations, allusions, and prevarications erected upon it, never forgetting the faith attached to it, sometimes how fast, others how tenuously, but not, of course, expounding or declaiming this faith unfairly, but exploring it, too, and showing the margin beyond which only belief permits certainty, and the lack of belief, if it tries to force itself, certain danger —our watchwords are Montaigne’s: What do I know? and, not necessarily an answer, Restraint.