Word: barzun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Education is indeed the dullest of subjects," remarks Jacques Barzun in his newly published Teacher in America (Little, Brown; $3), "and I intend to say as little about...
...Author Barzun has little indeed to say about Education, i.e., the vast, vague "phantasmagoria," the "sulphur-and-brimstone nebula," the "overheated Utopia" that is popularly expected to "make the City of God out of Public School No. 26." But about Teaching he says plenty. His brisk, irreverent, earnest book will ventilate a good many stuffy rooms in the U.S. schoolhouse...
...Jacques Barzun, 37-year-old son of a French scholar, was only nine when he taught his first class. That was in France during World War I, under the so-called Lancaster system, by which older pupils teach the younger. He followed his father to the U.S., found himself advanced enough in French, mathematics and philosophy to start a small tutoring business, worked his way through Columbia by ghostwriting on the side. Graduating in 1927 at the head of his class, he was promptly hired to teach at his alma mater and has been at it ever since...
...four strands, Romanticism, the "science" of racism, a vague economic socialism, and Volk collectivity," Wagner is analyzed to show his peculiar position as forerunner of the Nazis. Their idealism is precisely the "soaring into metapolitics" Wagner wrote of. This theory of Wagner Viereck holds in common with Jacques Barzun and Reinhold Niebuhr, and is backed up by Hitler's own words. Nazi metapolitics, however, though a definite creed, runs across the grain of western life. It exalts irrationality and denounces reason...
...doing this, Author Barzun believes, "the dogma and the confusion have plunged us into a state of scientific piety where we dare not call our soul our own." For this Barzun has some antidotes: 1) he would send science back to the field of technology where it belongs; 2) he would rescue purpose from the debris of late 19th-Century materialism. He thinks it was left to our century to do this job. He is not too sure it will succeed: "the possibilities which Henry Adams foresaw seem likely to come true all at once; cynical pessimism among the leaders...