Larry sent these from CA
To learn to write one must learn both a considerable portion of what has been written and how it was written.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 71
The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 69
Teaching cannot do well under the cult of innovation. Devotion to the new enforces a devaluation and dismissal of the old, which is necessarily the subject of teaching…. And here we meet a strange and difficult question that may be uniquely modern: Can the past be taught, can it even be known, by people who have no respect for it?
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 65
The goal of education-as-job-training, which is now the dominant pedagogical idea, is a high professional salary. Young people are being told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don’t, for instance, have to be an original discoverer to be a good science teacher. A high professional salary is not everything. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 58
How can an idea, which is not material, have a material origin? “Average” for example, is an idea which partakes of none of the physical properties of the things that are averaged. Materialism itself is an idea, just as immaterial as any other.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 50
