Steven Johnstone

Professor

“A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more.  A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.  A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.  A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex still.  A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit.  He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself.  In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught as such — or falsified.” 

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams