From the Academy

Among the real natural rights of men, said Edmund Burke, is the “right to instruction in life.” (Here Burke was contrasting genuinely natural rights—rights flowing from the human condition—with the “pretended rights” of the French revolutionaries.) Aye, the freedom to learn is more important than the freedom to teach; and this point is made carefully by Professor William Oliver Martin in a chapter called “Some Moral Relations between Student and Teacher,” contained in a new little book of his, Realism in Education (Harper & Row, $2.95).

Although there is an art to teaching, Dr. Martin tells us, the teacher is not morally entitled to act as if he were a sculptor, carving inanimate stone. “The student is a person who has a nature which is to be perfected in the way of knowing. The student is not just ‘stuff’ to be molded or shaped into an artifact according to the purposes of the teacher.

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Russell Kirk

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Among the real natural rights of men, said Edmund Burke, is the “right to instruction in life.” (Here Burke was contrasting genuinely natural rights—rights flowing from the human condition—with the “pretended rights” of the French revolutionaries.) Aye, the freedom to learn is more important than the freedom to teach; and this point is made carefully by Professor William Oliver Martin in a chapter called “Some Moral Relations between Student and Teacher,” contained in a new little book of his, Realism in Education (Harper & Row, $2.95).

Although there is an art to teaching, Dr. Martin tells us, the teacher is not morally entitled to act as if he were a sculptor, carving inanimate stone. “The student is a person who has a nature which is to be perfected in the way of knowing. The student is not just ‘stuff’ to be molded or shaped into an artifact according to the purposes of the teacher.