"There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech"
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Teaching, Bloom insists, is a kind of sanctioned mysticism. Strip away the lesson plans and grading rubrics and you still find a person standing in front of other people, wagering that words can reach past habit and self-interest to touch something inward and durable. He calls that inwardness "the soul" and the wager "magic" - deliberately loaded terms meant to embarrass a modern academy that prefers to describe education as skills delivery or socialization.
Bloom’s intent is polemical: to argue that even the most secular, method-driven teacher smuggles in metaphysical assumptions. You cannot teach as if students are only brains processing information or future workers accumulating competencies. The act of addressing them as beings who can be moved by an idea, converted by a book, unsettled by a question already treats them as more than mechanisms. "In practice" is the tell. He’s not talking about what teachers say at faculty meetings; he’s pointing to what their behavior betrays when they try to persuade, inspire, or awaken attention.
The subtext is also a warning about the costs of disavowing that magic. If we pretend speech has no transformative power, the classroom becomes therapy, training, or ideology management - anything but the risky encounter with truth Bloom cherished. Context matters: Bloom wrote amid late-20th-century battles over relativism, canon, and the university’s purpose. This line sharpens his larger claim that education is inherently moral and spiritual, whether or not it admits it, because it always aims at changing who a person is, not just what they know.
Bloom’s intent is polemical: to argue that even the most secular, method-driven teacher smuggles in metaphysical assumptions. You cannot teach as if students are only brains processing information or future workers accumulating competencies. The act of addressing them as beings who can be moved by an idea, converted by a book, unsettled by a question already treats them as more than mechanisms. "In practice" is the tell. He’s not talking about what teachers say at faculty meetings; he’s pointing to what their behavior betrays when they try to persuade, inspire, or awaken attention.
The subtext is also a warning about the costs of disavowing that magic. If we pretend speech has no transformative power, the classroom becomes therapy, training, or ideology management - anything but the risky encounter with truth Bloom cherished. Context matters: Bloom wrote amid late-20th-century battles over relativism, canon, and the university’s purpose. This line sharpens his larger claim that education is inherently moral and spiritual, whether or not it admits it, because it always aims at changing who a person is, not just what they know.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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