THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LIERATURE

There now that really grabbed you, didn't it?

It is, however well worth the time to read this wonderful piece from the New York Review of Books from 1999. The subject may be literature but the topic is education or as Emerson commented: can man be converted?

An answer that leads back, I believe, to the core of a literary education is to be found in an entry Emerson made in his journal 165 years ago. "The whole secret of the teacher's force," he wrote, "lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening." Having left the ministry two years before, Emerson was still in the process of transforming himself from a preacher into a lecturer, and of altering the form of his writing from the sermon to the essay. But his motive for speaking and writing had not changed with the shedding of his frock. Like every great teacher, he was in the business of trying to "get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep."
None of us who has ever been a student can fail to read this passage without remembering some teacher by whom we were startled out of complacency about our own ignorance. For this to take place, the student must be open to it, and the teacher must overcome the incremental fatigue of repetitive work and somehow remain a professor in the religious sense of that word—ardent, exemplary, even fanatic.
Literary studies, in fact, have their roots in religion. Trilling understood this when he remarked, in his gloomy essay about the future of the humanities, that "the educated person" had traditionally been conceived as
an initiate who began as a postulant, passed to a higher level of experience, and became worthy of admission into the company of those who are thought to have transcended the mental darkness and inertia in which they were previously immersed.

please see, www.nybooks.com/articles/318