This concludes the morning announcements

It must attempt all this, but if there is a possibility of success it must not be done expressly. This is the one invaluable lesson the current school has to give. The more there are statistical studies and scholarly committees and mission statements, the more the burden of actually learning is shifted onto the luck and personality of the individual student—which can make things very exciting, but it certainly isn’t the way to go about educating the majority.

Which begs the same question we began with, but with a slightly different emphasis: some people will learn, given a teacher, whether that teacher facilitates the learning directly or by way of irony as the student works around him—but is it realistic to suppose there is something a teacher can do to make anyone and everyone a learner? Even by trying to embrace the irony, which sounds sophistical but looks very simple as I picture the discussions they will have in the new school, and the dawning realization of the students as they reach a certain age that it all has been orchestrated for them, for the only kind of learning possible—it is really my own school experience, only everyone is revealed to have only been playing all along, playing when they assigned forgettable books, playing when they ran infinite quantities of copies, playing when they held forth solemnly about keeping things orderly in 3-ring binders. Because they cannot have been serious, all that may have been the surface, but surely there was something buried, the real school. Now all I want is to bring it all back to the surface, so that the student still has to realize it for himself, but so that it is not so lonely a job, nor so heavy a chore.

This means keeping the books, but making them unforgettable; requiring essays, but showing how to write them, and why, and why they deserve to be kept. In this way I hope learning will approach its purpose so nearly that a scientific inquiry and a scholarly conference to interpret it will never again seem like something that ought to be ordered up. In other words, what was done by before by mischief will be shown someday into the care of honesty.

I don’t know if it is possible; certainly the duplicity of mischief is thoroughly entangled with our present society—school is just one of the most hypocritical examples; as certainly, honesty for this very reason as well as its innate and proper virtue can go safely, as if it were the highest mischief.

But if all the rest is dismissed as sleight of hand, grant me this: let us teach good books.

Have a Marvelous Monday.