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Democracy's Middle Way: An Essay on "Can 'Education' be Defined?" |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / T.S. ELIOT ON THE AIMS OF EDUCATION |
| Author: Jean Bethke Elshtain |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1993 |
| Size: 4,267 Words, 25,636 Characters |
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Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say," writes Eliot, and here one is reminded of Flannery O'Connor's pithy riposte to a query from an earnest young student following a lecture she had given on the state of American fiction. The student fretted that education, the dead hand of the past, must surely stifle many a budding genius. Did not O'Connor find this to be the case? Her typically sardonic response was that, on the contrary, education didn't "stifle enough of them." She would surely join hands with Eliot in holding that everyone has something to say but not everything said is worthy of sustained attention. How to sort the wheat from the chaff, especially on a subject on which all feel they have something to say?
This quickly takes us to the heart...
. . .
...cepted for, even being called upon to suffer for; it is no doubt a mystery that this should be the case. But it is not an accident. The via media of which Eliot writes and which Havel exemplifies is no tepid compromise; rather, it is the rare but now and then attainable fruit of the democratic imagination, an imagination nurtured by what can only be called a cultivated religious sensibility.
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