Jacob Klein presents the model of teaching best fitting a stable community of liberal learning. He was a master of the somewhat mysterious art of leading from behind—by solicitous listening, by intimating questions, even by expectant silence. The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob [...]
Modernity is best apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That perspective makes those who hold it avid participants in the present. Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of [...]
Eva Brann seems to have a refreshing effect on all who meet her. This must have something to do with her openness to the world in all its manifestations, her spritely and generous spirit, her mischievous love of play, and her gift of friendship. Today, she still looks like she is experiencing a giddy delight [...]
In the last few years, accounts of the growing politicization of academic discourse have made their way from colleges and universities onto conversations on a public, and perhaps national, scale. What is the essence behind such rancor?… There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. -G. K. Chesterton[1] [...]
Jacob Klein was, first and last, every inch a teacher, a teacher who stymied discipleship in the very effort to induce learning. He did, indeed, have some teachings to convey—a few, though those were powerful and of large consequence… Editor’s Note: This essay was read as a tribute to philosopher and long-time tutor of St. [...]
The great vehicle of liberal learning is discussion, in which begetting, questioning, refuting, and again questioning take place… What I have to speak about, briefly and in a most elementary way, is what both learning and teaching mean and do not mean. Learning and teaching are mysterious processes. To understand them fully would mean to [...]
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of [...]
Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of St. John’s College in 1957 when I came as a young tutor. He died in 1978, still teaching. In those twenty-one years during which I knew him, he was above all a teacher—mine and everybody’s. His spirit informed the college. While [...]
My subject, as proposed, is “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.” Whether that subject actually interests you, or you think that it ought to interest you, you will, I imagine, regard it as a respectable topic. And yet I have to tell you that every term in the project is wrong-headed. Let me therefore begin by explaining [...]
I want to steal four minutes of my talking time to speak of the role that the Santa Fe campus has played in my life. I remember vividly the atmosphere around its founding in the years before 1964, but only confusedly the arguments pro and con—though among the latter one worry was predominant: Were we [...]