Abraham’s Autobiography »


Hugh Nibley on Education

A very interesting thing happened when I was in Berkely during a sabbatical. i was teaching there. One student came to me. His name was Brown-a very fine young man. He had a problem. And this is the liberal Berkley crowd, you know. “How can I break the news to my parents that I really believe there is a God?” But here [at BYU] I’m not subversive. I can get away with anything here because I can back it up with the scriptures. Here I can quote the scriptures freely. I’m going to bring that in no matter what. This is the only place I don’t have to apologize for it. Even in school here teaching, the teacher cannot teach you at all. He’s there to save you time. And when you bear your testimony, that is what you do, you don’t twist anybody’s arm or force them to believe. Now I believe, so you better believe or else! Well that’s utterly meaningless. In other words, then, you’re saying, “Well, what good does it do to say, ‘I believe’? How will that affect another person?”

It’s the same way with the writen word. It will move some people very deeply and of course have no effect on others. Or the mere undesrtanding of the written word, which is a mystery-after all, nobody knows how that takes place. Writing itself is-as Galileo says-the most marvelous device ever invented. He says no invention will ever approach writing for sophistication and the marvelous things it does-to transfer knowledge, the most delicate nuances of knowledge, and feeling and emotion over thousands of years through any distance in space. It beats any TV or anything else you could possibly devise. It’s marvelous! And do that, he says, with 24, 26 little symbols, very simple designs that does the whole thing. And what a marvelous thing that was. That’s given by the finger of the Lord. But to work it, you have to know what’s going on; you have to read into it. Unless you know what you are reading, you can’t read it.

From The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley: Volume 17

Tags:

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Education, Vol17. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8,218 Responses to “Hugh Nibley on Education”