Word: classes
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...professions are still crafts; they are still assemblies of knowledge which have been passed down through generations in order to express the constructive urge that makes humanity special. Harvard, after all, is a trade school for the craft of thinking, and its students are no more than a privileged class of apprentices who mimic the techniques, manners, and values of their masters. Filling out a Selective Service registration form, the great essayist and country farmer E. B. White wrestled over what to enter for his primary job. “Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming...
...long is to allow the mind to wander invisibly. At best, it wanders to a place where the lecturer’s ideas are tested and challenged, which means that one has also missed ten minutes of the ongoing lecture. At worst, the mind simply counts the minutes until class is over. There is never a guarantee that all, or even most students, will, by the end of the term, be able to articulate most of the intellectual goals of the class. When I graduated, for instance, I couldn’t even have explained what anthropology...
...there is hardly a bad set—is central to collegiate intellectual growth. There could hardly be a better illustration than the wisdom of the Freshman Dean’s Office having assigned me to bunk in the penthouse of Grays middle entry with a tall, handsome, working-class and hilariously cynical white boy from Georgia. A lifelong hunter, he could hardly have seemed more different from me—a scion of the “Gold Coast” Afrostocracy of Washington. We irritated each other with occasional lapses in the tidiness that we both prized...
...decade or more. We debate over which of our disciplines matter—and to what degree in today’s world of business, politics, warfare, and health concerns—with the intent to decide the mental shape of the next generation’s ruling class...
...intent to make such a decision is profoundly undemocratic and perhaps excessively confident that the processes that designate us as experts also qualify us to decide what the next generation should know. We mime a process by which tomorrow’s ruling class will also make such undemocratic but “expertly-informed” decisions about the poor and working people of the planet. The Harvard scholars who populated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the Vietnam War provide ample evidence that our expertise can bear grievous results. One hopes that the Harvard experts now managing...