education
What We Know About Writers
From Those Who Create, by Jane Piirto:
1. They are often early readers.
2. They have often experienced childhood trauma and may suffer from depression.
3. They used early reading and writing to escape.
4. They have high conceptual and verbal intelligence
5. They are independent, nonconforming, and not interested in joining groups
6. They value self-expression and are productive
7. They are often driven, able to take rejection, and like to work alone for long periods of time.
8. They often have difficulty with alcohol.
9. They prefer writing as their mode of expression of emotions and feelings.
10. They often have an advanced verbal sense of humor.
Adrienne Rich
Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name.
Wallace Stegner
Most artists are flawed; but they probably ought to make the effort not to be. But how do you teach people to enlarge themselves in order to enlarge their writing? You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of person you are. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, its teeth grow long and lock.
I guess you can suggest the ideal of it, the notion that it is a good thing to be large and magnanimous and wise, that it is a better aim in life than pleasure or money or fame. By comparison, it seems to me, pleasure and money, and probably fame as well, are contemptible goals. I would go so far as to say that to a class. But not all of the class would believe me.
Wendell Berry
To assume that the context of literature is "the literary world" is, I believe, simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the community--that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the life of a place--may not be recognized by most theorists and critics for awhile yet. But they will finally come to it, because finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the study of literature and restore it to importance.
Samuel Johnson (Boswell)
Talking of education, "People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures!"
Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or further still, between him and it. Let him build himself a loghouse with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven years or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.
Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture
Eventually I had to decide that there was only one way to give the course, which was to give it without strategies and without conscious caution. It was not honorable, either to the students or to the authors, to conceal or disguise my relation to the literature, my commitment to it, my fear of it, my ambivalence toward it. The literature had to be dealt with in the terms it announced itself. As for the students, I have never given assent to the modern saw about "teaching students, not subjects"--I have always thought it right to teach subjects, believing that if one gives his first loyalty to the subject, the student is best instructed. So I resolved to give the course with no considerations in mind except my own interests. And since my own interests lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate moral fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen images of personal being, and images of personal being as having something to do with literary style, I felt free to begin with what for me was a first concern, the animus of the author, the objects of his will, the the things he wants or wants to have happen.
Chen Shengtan, Preface to the Western Chamber
I am sure the future generations will want to read, and wanting to read, they must have friends. These friends come and go, and sometimes do not come, and do not leave. Perhaps one likes a passage, and he reads and lets the others hear it. Perhaps one doubts the ideas of a passage, and he reads it and discusses it with them. Then all of them read it together and discuss it together. They all sit together and do not read and laugh and have a good time. I wish to be their friend and read and enjoy and discuss a passage with them. Unfortunately, they are not yet born, and when they are born, I shall have gone. What can I do?
Walter Benjamin
Who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship, and not children?