I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.
It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.
The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.
In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.
When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.
I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."
The toughest thing for a homeschooler is the same as for a school teacher - shifting from a weak tea vision of math being grinding calculations to a rich frothy mug of math as an active way of thinking.
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.
The notion of the large, massive public university that can exist in isolated splendor is dead.
