A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
Interpretation
The impact of a teacher extends beyond their immediate students, influencing future generations in unseen ways.
Wendell Berry emphasizes the long-lasting and often unrecognized influence teachers have on their students and, subsequently, their descendants. This quote reflects the belief that education is a profound act of faith, where teachers invest in their students with the hope that their contributions will shape lives in the future, and students honor this by sharing their experiences and testimonies.
In practice
In a graduation speech emphasizing the importance of educators and their long-term impact.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.
The school-to-prison pipeline - the disproportionality that exists in handing out school discipline in schools to Black and Brown students for simple infractions - pushes kids out of classrooms and into our ever-growing system of mass incarceration.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
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