Also Archived: Leavis on Studying English

From F. R. Leavis, which sums up very nicely much of my own thinking about the academic/educative process, and what it should be about:

Well then, I know that the demand I make of English, the role I think properly assigned to it in the modern university, is such to provoke a good deal of scepticism. And when I proceed to the considerations that bring out the cogency of the assignment, I shall invite, I know, some more scepticism. But I ask the sceptics to contemplate-- to look well in the face-- what their scepticism implies. When, then, I try to suggest the ways in which the role I have defined as that of the university English School could be justified, one of my assumptions is that no one will be reading English who hasn't a bent for literary study and isn't positively intelligent. To put it another way, no one should be reading English who can't benefit by 'teaching' addressed to the top level. I see the word 'teaching' in inverted commas; I don't like it, because of the suggestion it carries of telling-- authoritative telling. The peculiar nature of the study of English worth pursuing at university level entails its being in the the most essential regards, though a special study, not what 'specialist' suggests. A genuine teacher doesn't find himself holding back his subtlest insight and his most adventurous thought because they are not suitable for communication to first- or second-year men. He tests and develops in 'teaching' his perceptions, his understanding and his thought, and with good men may do so very fruitfully. For what we call teaching is, if genuine, a matter of enlisting and fostering collaboration; the teacher in English has, in what I have pointed to with the distinction between 'special' and 'specialst', a peculiar advantage-- a given kind of advantage in a peculiarly reward form. The qualifications of a teacher are given in these observations. He is one who has the kinds of interest in literature that go with finding pleasure and profit in discussing it with intelligent young students.

--- F. R. Leavis, "The Present and the Past: Eliot's Demonstration," English Literature In Our Time and the University (1969)