Extended excerpt [Non-fiction.]:

“Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play – work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.)” (p. 66)

Source: Editor’s copy – Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (2013) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-1-62040-107-1

Extended excerpt [Non-fiction]:

“Immersed in preprofessionalism, swimming in entertainment, my students have been sealed off from the chance to call everything they’ve valued into question, to look at new ways of life, and to risk everything. For them, education is knowing and lordly spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one’s life. 

These thoughts of mine didn’t come with any anger at my students. For who was to blame them? They didn’t create the consumer biosphere whose air was now their purest oxygen. They weren’t the ones who should have pulled the plug on the TV or disabled the game port when they were kids. They hadn’t invited the ad flaks and money changers into their public schools. What I felt was an ongoing sense of sorrow about their foreclosed possibilities.” (p. 16)

Source: Library – Why Read? (2004|2005 paperback edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 1-58234-608-9

Extended excerpt [Non-fiction]:

“Given the way universities are now administered (which is more and more to say, given the way that they are currently marketed), is it a shock that the kids don’t come to school hot to learn, unable to bear their own ignorance? For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent—which is much different from simple depression—is a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.” (p. 19)

Source : Editor’s copy – Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (2013) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-1-62040-107-1

Extended excerpt [Non-fiction]:

“One of the most important jobs a teacher has is to allow students to make contact with their ignorance. We need to provide a scene where not-knowing is, at least at the outset, valued more than full, worldly confidence. Thoreau heading to Walden Pond almost empty-handed, or Emily Dickinson going up to her room in Amherst to engage in a solitary dialogue with God, are grand versions of the kind of open and daring endeavor that we can all engage in for ourselves.” (p. 35)

Source: Library – Why Read? (2004|2005 paperback edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 1-58234-608-9

Extended excerpt [Magazine essay. Italics original to cited text.]:

“Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. “Life piled on life / Were all too little,” says Tennyson’s Ulysses, and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once?” (pp. 113-114)

Source note: The cited quote was also included in a July 2013 Chronicle of Higher Education excerpt of Why Teach?. Please see the “Source Link” tab for the link to this edition.

Source [Featured source]: Editor’s copy – Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (2013) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-1-62040-107-1

Source [Magazine – book excerpt]: “The Ideal English Major” (29 July 2013) online via The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Ideal-English-Major/140553/