The Education of a Teacher

By combining autobiography with cultural history, English professor Howard Wolf takes us through the 1960s and up to the present much in the way a personal guide would lead us through a museum full of wonders.

The Education of a Teacher traces Wolf's odyssey as he discovers his vocation, from his own college days to his tenure in a Turkish university as a visiting Fulbright scholar. The decades unfold for us: the cold war, student activism, Vietnam, and a trend toward student apathy all prepare us for the technological immediacy of the 1980s. Wolf was and is a passionate participant in the political, literary, and social events that have constituted our recent culture.

The Education of a Teacher is a collection of essays about higher education and American culture that dramatizes and humanizes the often abstractly treated subject of education. Howard Wolf always tries to understand the classroom and the setting of his university in terms of the larger currents of the culture and to make his approach to literature and his students relevant to these currents. Wolf's connections between autobiography and the significant trends of our time enrich the historical record.

This collection of essays by a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo is a distillation of his more than two decades of experience with students. Wolf's chronicle of American culture in relation to university life has an autobiographical framework. The '60s, shaped by the Vietnam war and student rebellion, were a high-water mark in his evolution as a charismatic teacher for whom the classroom is a microcosm. The quiescence of students in the '70s and their careerism in the '80s are currents that render his classes a testing ground of values as he attempts to make English literature relevant to young adults. Wolf's support of the thesis that learning and human development must be connected is explored in a wide swath of reference and personal vignettes. He is the author of Forgive the Father.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.