Idealism and Liberal Education

Becoming an Educator

Becoming an Educator When I was a schoolboy, we were required to read Macaulay's magisterial Essay on Johnson. Published in 1856, it remains an ideal model of expository prose and one ofthe best short assessments of the life and work ofthe great eighteenth-century critic and lexicographer. The final homework assignment was to identify the sentence in Macaulay's essay that best captured the essence of Johnson's life. The memory of that essay has stayed with me ever since, as has the key sentence: "But the force ofhis mind overcame every impediment." Few of us in this post-Freudian age are apt to believe that we can encapsulate the essence of our own life in a single sentence. But sometimes lives do seem to be framed by a theme. For me, the central theme has surely been a love of learning and reading, together with, from an early age, the profound desire to become a scholar and a teacher. Almost everything that I have sought to achieve, personally and professionally, derives from that theme. A more difficult and interesting task is to identify the forces that created and shaped that defining theme. For me, as for most people, those forces were primarily family and education. As Pope wrote in his Moral Essays, "'Tis education forms the common mind, I Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." In my case, the twig was bent both by my father and by my mother, although each did so in quite different ways. Born in London, my father came to this country when he was seven years old. At Bates College, from which he was graduated in 1920, he read widely in English and American literature, forming a particular admiration for Shakespeare, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. However, as an immigrant to this country, he wanted to learn more about literature written by Jews, and he proposed, accordingly, to write a senior thesis on the novels of Israel Zangwill-books now long forgotten, books with such characteristic titles as The Mantle ofElijah, Children ofthe Ghetto, Dreamers ofthe Ghetto, and The Melting Pot. Although Zangwill was one of the most popular Jewish writers ofthe early years of this century (his collected works, published in 1925, run to fourteen volumes), my father's advisor did not regard Zangwill as an acceptable subject for a thesis. He urged my 9 10 Idealism and Liberal Education father to select another-by which he undoubtedly meant a less provincial and more mainstream-writer. My father next suggested Abraham Cahan, the founder of the influential Yiddish-language newspaper in New York City, the Jewish Daily Forward, and author of The Rise of David Levinsky and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, both of which he wrote in English. Although Cahan was admired by no less a literary figure than William Dean Howells for the realism with which he depicted ghetto and immigrant life, my father's advisor urged him to look still further for a topic. Although I do not know the outcome of my father's search for a thesis topic, the story is for me a poignant demonstration of the significance he placed on understanding those writers who sought to explore what it meant to be an immigrant Jew in America. My father was a gentle, bookish man of extraordinary personal strength. Through his own reading habits, he set a powerful example. Indeed, in the most characteristic recollection I have of him, he is settled into a comfortable living room chair after dinner, as he was almost every evening, reading books worth reading. He was by profession a teacher of high school English, and he truly loved the classic works he taught: Macbeth , Idylls ofthe King, The House ofthe Seven Gables, Ethan Frome, Silas Marner, and David Copperfield. He is remembered to this day, by a generation of students, as an effective and caring teacher. My mother, too, loved literature. Although her formal education extended only through high school, she was well read and numbered among her proudest possessions a handsome two-volume set of The Life and Letters ofJean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as several dozen of the original volumes of the Modem Library, including many of her favorites-The Golden Treasury and works by such writers as George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Olive Schreiner, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, Edith Wharton, W. H. Hudson, and James Branch Cabell. Although my mother enjoyed literature, it was...