Teaching in an Age of Ideology Quotes

“Voegelin displayed all of these qualities because he understood teaching as an existential quest with students that ascends from ideological disorder to wisdom (sophia) and practical judgment (phronesis). Teachers and learners form an existential community because together they turn, and have their souls turned, from becoming to being. For Voegelin, the “art of the periagoge” consists of inculcating the habits necessary for these existential virtues, and the methods used to inculcate them are various because they require the teacher to dig more deeply than reason into the souls of the students. As Voegelin indicates, his lifelong work is the result of the need to show students why the life of reason is indeed the pursuit of truth. His scholarship and teaching has as its core the moral aspiration for existential life in truth.”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“The dominance of mediocrity within modern democracy means that it needs something more than mass culture provides. Democracy, even as the home of mass culture, “requires in the long run qualities of an entirely different kind [from those typically produced within mass culture]: qualities of dedication, of concentration, of breadth, and of depth” (WILE, 4).”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“Therefore, liberal education is defined as “studying with proper care the great books which the greatest minds have left behind” (WILE 1).”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism” (Ibid).”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“The political aim of liberal education today is not the inculcation of one or another political ideology but rather the fostering of political moderation, a moderation that stays away from the one extreme of “visionary expectations from politics” as well as the opposite extreme of “unmanly contempt for politics” (LER, 28).”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“Philosophy may not be capable of settling the question of created vs. eternal world, but it can settle a yet more fundamental question—what is the place of man and man’s mind within the whole. These pleasures and the insight into the correspondence of man and world make philosophy a life worth living, and the basic experience of understanding is open to many if not all, for the experience of understanding is not limited to the “greatest minds.”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“What is Liberal Education?” Midway through that address Strauss identifies liberal education as “education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence”; “liberal education,” he says, “consists in reminding ourselves of human greatness,” which means attending to “Plato’s suggestion that education in the highest sense is philosophy”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“At the same time, though, Voegelin, like Plato, was aware that education is a matter of eliciting knowledge and not of inserting knowledge. As we have seen, Voegelin’s self-understanding as a scholar is intimately connected to his self-understanding as a teacher. We saw how Weber could not explain his activity of being a scientist in terms of his science, which, as Voegelin notes, is a question at the forefront of the minds of students who wish to know on what basis their teacher is telling them to act the way he suggests. For Voegelin, the life of science is bound up with the activity of science and this means that so-called “research” and teaching are, in the end, two activities with the same end, the cultivation of society living in existential truth.”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“The art of the periagoge is a matter of turning the entire person around from becoming to being. It helps to cultivate the virtues Plato describes, but ultimately “the educator can do no more than turn this organ of vision, if it exists in the soul of man, around from the realm of becoming to the realm of being and the brightest region of being—‘and that, we say, is the Agathon’ (518c).” The teacher can do no more because knowledge cannot be put into the soul, as the sophists believe.”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“reveal one of Aron’s foundational pillars: the necessity of hierarchy. Aron was fully aware that in any educational environment some students will surpass their teachers, and some teachers will fall below their students. But May 1968 tried to make this exception the rule: throughout”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“As Thucydides taught Aron so well, and as he knew from his own experience, revolutions—even psychodramas like this one—do not cause moderates and centrists to rush into the streets and clamor for reasonable and meaningful change (ER xvii, 10, 20–21, 34, 126, 164ff.).”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“Similar to Aristotle, Aron sought to understand as clearly and objectively as possible the competing claims of those in the political arena, not in order to traduce his opponents but rather to instill a needed dose of moderation into the likely heated debates. Aron understood that no claim (or party) in politics is either completely wrong or right, and that no side has a perfectly just cause: as he was wont to remind others, politics is not about good versus evil but about choosing between “the preferable and the detestable,” and”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology

“says later, the “prosperity” of positive sciences has blinded us and has “meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.”
― Lee Trepanier, Teaching in an Age of Ideology