Education Quote by Leslie Fiedler

Good teaching, Fiedler implies, is a kind of benevolent mind-reading: the talent to hear past the fumble and locate the real hunger underneath. Putting William Faulkner in the role of “great teacher” is slyly corrective. We canonize Faulkner as the difficult novelist, the high priest of labyrinthine sentences; Fiedler recasts him as a pragmatist of human need, someone less interested in policing language than in rescuing meaning.

The key move is the phrase “asked a question ineptly.” That adverb carries a whole classroom power dynamic: students perform intelligence under pressure, and their performance often fails them. Faulkner’s virtue, as described here, isn’t merely patience; it’s interpretive generosity. He treats the question as a draft. He assumes the student is reaching for something coherent even if the reach comes out crooked. In an academic culture where “gotcha” corrections can pass for rigor, Fiedler praises the opposite instinct: answer the best version of what was attempted, not the weakest version of what was said.

Fiedler’s own context matters. As a major mid-century American critic, he sparred with gatekeeping and pieties about “proper” literary understanding. His compliment doubles as a quiet rebuke to critics and professors who reward verbal polish over genuine inquiry. The subtext is almost moral: pedagogy is not the art of exposing ignorance; it’s the art of translating it into a question that can actually be lived with. Faulkner, improbably, becomes the model of that translation.