Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Seidel Canby

Arrogance, pedantry, dogmatism: Canby arranges the indictment like a medical chart, then delivers the sting with a clinician’s calm. Calling them “occupational diseases” is the wickedly precise move. It reframes moral failings as workplace hazards, the way miners get black lung. Teaching isn’t condemned; the institution of authority is. The line suggests that the classroom can incubate a particular deformation: the slow conversion of expertise into superiority, of clarity into nitpicking, of conviction into doctrine.

The target is “those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young,” a phrase that makes education sound less like cultivation than traffic control. “Directing” implies a one-way flow of power. The subtext is that young minds are not just learners but a captive audience, and captivity tempts the instructor toward performance: the ego stroke of being right, the safety of rules, the seduction of systems. Pedantry becomes a way to keep the upper hand, dogmatism a way to avoid being challenged by the very curiosity education is supposed to spark.

Context matters: Canby comes out of an early-to-mid 20th-century American literary culture that prized “liberal education” but worried about its bureaucratization and the professionalization of criticism. His warning reads like an internal memo to intellectuals: if your job is shaping minds, your greatest professional risk is forgetting that minds push back. The line works because it flatters no one; it treats certainty itself as a pathogen when paired with unchecked authority.