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Sad news today of the passing of Eva Brann, the long-time tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, at the age of 95. She was still leading seminars well into her 90s and was a legend well beyond the borders of St. John’s. Few teachers were as dedicated as she to the old tradition of the Great Books, for she understood the greatness of classic texts was intrinsic, and not susceptible to the fickleness of historicist corruption.

As she wrote at the opening of The Paradoxes of Education in a Republic in 1979, with counsel that fits our current moment very well:

It seems to me that our time is not an era in which the scene of learning can teem with much newness. I believe that possibility began to vanish three centuries ago, when methods for the intentional production of novelty were instituted and innovation became a term of daily business. I think the external excitation and the internal feeling of dust-and-ashes with which each foray into novelty is received are indices of this condition. Compare for instance the insipid and rehearsed mode in which modern men take possession of an arid moon with the marveling exactitude of the first relations concerning the landings in the strange New World, even by so gold-obsessed a man as Columbus—or, more to the point, the early educational writings of this Republic with the dreary “revolutions” of contemporary publication.

Our strength is not in newness anymore. I think that we live—barring catastrophe—in a gently heaving but essentially stable country “builded as a city that is compact together.” There may indeed be enormous social shifts, great revolutions of opinion, large changes in “life styles,” “accelerating tendencies” this way and that. But all these phenomena of aggregation need not—do not—bring with them one genuine epiphany of newness. The educational scene mirrors the era and the country. It, too, is an enormous, compacted complex of cherished vestiges, trashed experiments, recovered truisms, partial reformations, occasional explosions, compromising accommodations, paths of least resistance, hopeful engraftings, institutional inertia. The educational main is a shoal of wrecked reports, of reports widely disseminated and minimally implemented. And the most revolutionary reforms leave the scene most diminished:

Mountains will heave to bring forth/Born: a ridiculous mouse.

—Horace, Ars Poetica, 139.