"Technological Progress"

"But in general, apart from its own highly specialized standards of quantity and efficiency, 'technological progress' has produced a social and ecological decline.  Industrial war, except by the most fanatically narrow standards, is worse than war used to be.  Industrial agriculture, except by the standards of quantity and mechanical efficiency, diminishes everything it affects. Industrial workmanship is certainly worse than traditional workmanship, and is getting shoddier every day.  After forty-odd years, the evidence is everywhere that television, far from proving a great tool of education, is a tool of stupefaction and disintegration.  Industrial education has abandoned the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation."

 Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine"

Garden Song

Think Little

Gems from the quotable Wendell Berry.

"Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet."

"Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato."

"We need better government, no doubt about it.  But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.  We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own."

"A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways."

"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening.  A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.  He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.  The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can by at a store.  He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and reuse its own wastes.  If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure.  He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people."

"...most of the vegetables necessary for a family of four can be grown on a plot of forty by sixty feet."

Wendell Berry, "Think Little"

 

 

Leisure

"As Christians who already participate in the worship of God, we ought especially to think of our time together in "school" as a gift: the gift of leisure, of "free" time from work for students, and for teachers the wonderful opportunity to be not so much taskmasters as masters of ceremonies."

Alan Jacobs, "On Charitable Teaching"

Where Jesus Is

Attentiveness

"If you learn to give sustained and intense attention to a problem in your school work, you will be better positioned to give such attention to your suffering neighbor, and to God in prayer.  And because it does not come naturally to us to love God or our neighbor, the subjects we like least in school are the ones that can be most spiritually useful to us, because attentiveness to them will be hard-won and therefor emore useful when we turn to other things we would rather do.  'If we concentrate our attentions,' Weil says, 'on trying to solve a problem in geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to success than we were at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute in that hour in another more mysterious dimension.  Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.  The result will one day be discovered in prayer' (Waiting on God, p. 106).  It is vital that we practice such discipline, Weil argues, because 'warmth of heart' does not really count for much in prayer, though we would like to think it does.  Sudden loving feelings for people will not sustain us for more than a few seconds before they fade, whereas 'quality of attention' sustains prayers for far longer."

Alan Jacobs, "On Charitable Teaching"

Charitable Teaching (1)

"Now it is true that some people will immediately say that the teacher who takes her job seriously enough to actually teach (meaning, usually, to lecture) is the teacher who treats her students with real charity; while other people will equally quickly insist that only a decentralized classroom in which students assume full accountability for their own education is truly charitably.  And maybe some will say that real charity is practiced by those in the middle, those who take lessons from both camps.  We should no listen to any of those people.  They are too quick.  They assume,  and such assumption is problematic, not just because it smacks of self-justification but also because we cannot take it for granted that the models of teaching most consistent with Christian charity are already on the table.  How radical are the demands of Christian love!  The person who loves most deeply lays down her life for her friends; the loving person blesses those  who spitefully use him.  Is it  likely that practices consistent with these demands are built into the already available structures of teaching and learning?  No, to seek charity--to seek to become a charitable person--is to open oneself to almost anything. Perhaps everything e think we know is wrong.  In the end, nothing may remain of our familiar habits, our favorite strategies.  Then again, perhaps all that we do will remain, but renewed, even transfigured.  Who can say?  If we wish to be open to the mandate of charity, if we are willing to rethink what we habitually do in the classroom in hopes of practicing Christian love toward our students, where do we begin?"

Alan Jacobs, "On Charitable Teaching"