Gilbert Highet - On Education

On Education

Like others teaching at Columbia at this time – Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Eric Bentley, Ernest Nagel – Gilbert Highet conceived of his work as the fostering of a tradition. "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but 'minds' alive on the shelves," Highet wrote. He believed that "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."

As a scholar in an era in which democracy, communism, and fascism vied for supremacy, he believed it was the duty of the intellectual to support freedom and defend pluralism. "The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same," he wrote. "They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people."

Above all, he was devoted to learning from the past. "History is a strange experience," he wrote in the introduction to an essay on Byzantium. "The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts." Despite this, as Highet showed above all in his masterpiece The Classical Tradition, it was possible to discover in the past a great humanizing river of learning which connected the present to the Biblical and especially the Greek and Roman civilizations, and through his marvelously evocative, graceful prose to make one feel at home in that flow of past lives, and to long for it. Highet tended to be critical of contemporary literature, attributing to it decadent qualities.

He himself was a great teacher. Robert J. Ball, in an appreciation under the heading Living Legacies published in 2001 in the Columbia University Alumni Magazine, wrote: "When Gilbert Highet entered the classroom, one felt as though the curtain were going up on a Broadway play, with a living legend in the lead. He reminded students (not surprisingly) of a British Army officer— of the kind portrayed by Jack Hawkins in motion pictures—tall, erect, handsome, clean-shaven, and impeccably dressed. He consistently gave his audience a commanding performance, whether he spoke or sang or stood or walked, with a presence comparable to that of Laurence Olivier or John Houseman. ... With his powerful and speculative mind, he gave his students an extraordinary intellectual experience, capped by a showmanship perhaps unparalleled in the American college classroom."