Art & Creativity Quote by Jacques Barzun

Barzun’s line lands with the sly precision of someone who’s watched institutions congratulate themselves while quietly letting the core work rot. “Teaching is not a lost art” is the feint: the craft still exists, the techniques can be learned, good teachers still walk into classrooms every day. The real indictment arrives after the comma. What’s “lost” isn’t ability but esteem - the cultural habit of treating teaching as high-status labor rather than a service job with moral window dressing.

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say we’ve stopped valuing teachers; he says the “regard” is a “lost tradition.” That’s sharper, and more pessimistic. Traditions are maintained by ritual: who gets listened to, who gets paid, who gets time, whose expertise is trusted. Barzun implies the problem is structural and social, not personal: you can’t fix it with inspirational posters or “teacher appreciation” cupcakes if the tradition of respect has been replaced by metrics, bureaucracy, and suspicion.

Contextually, Barzun wrote across a century when education became mass-scaled, professionalized, and politicized. In that world, teaching gets treated as either sentimental vocation (“do it for the kids”) or technical delivery system (“raise the scores”). Both framings flatter everyone except the teacher as an intellectual actor. The subtext is almost conservative in the best sense: civilization depends on transmission, and societies that stop honoring the transmitters shouldn’t be surprised when the culture thins out.