Yesterday’s note about C.K. Ogden was based solely on an interview with one of his collaborators, I.A. Richards. Richards, an Englishman, ended up teaching at Harvard. Richards had this to say about education:
I think we have a better way of teaching English, but while you're teaching English, you might as well teach everything else. That is to say, a world position, what's needed for living, a philosophy of religion, how to find things out and the whole works — mental and moral seed for the planet. In this way the two-thirds of the planet that doesn't yet know how to read and write would learn in learning how to read and write English, the things that would help them find their answers to ”Where should man go?”
I’m of the same mind. It’s enormously hard to tell others what they should do. But, if asked, we all ought to take a stab at. That is, if someone really wants to know what we think, we ought to have something to say.
• Source: B. Ambler Boucher and John Paul Russo, “An Interview With I.A. Richards”; The Harvard Crimson, March 11, 1969.
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