I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of making complex ideas accessible to others, acknowledging the difficulty of understanding them initially.
Terry Eagleton expresses his belief in the value of popularizing complex ideas, viewing it as both a skill and a responsibility. He highlights the importance of empathy in education, reminding us that we often forget the struggles we faced when grappling with difficult concepts. This sentiment suggests that sharing knowledge should involve an awareness of the challenges others may encounter.
In practice
In a lecture on advanced theories, I might quote Eagleton to remind students of the importance of making ideas accessible.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn't do that with a lot of people.
A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.
You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.
Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them.
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
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