The website for What So Proudly We Hail has compiled several tributes to Amy Kass, who died Wednesday. Joining those from Bill Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb are thoughts from Robert P. George and William Schambra.
At National Review, Yuval Levin remembers who he calls “the best teacher I ever saw in action.” Here’s an excerpt:
Amy Kass, who died yesterday after a long and courageous struggle with cancer, was without a doubt the best teacher I ever saw in action. What she did so masterfully was, in a sense, simple: She would throw a great work of fiction in front of a group of eager, overconfident students, invite them to open it up and turn it over and over together, and then gradually help them discover that it had actually opened them instead. What resulted were some of the most remarkable conversations I’ve ever witnessed—not just among students at the University of Chicago, where she taught for decades, but also among the reading groups of (even more overconfident) adult Washingtonians she led occasionally at the Hudson Institute, where she worked for the last decade of her life.
Amy’s teaching and writing were driven by the conviction that the stories we tell shape our souls and bind us together, and by the worry that we too often now fail to take care about how our souls are shaped and how (or whether at all) we are bound together in community. She tried to help her students realize that what they longed for—intellectually, spiritually, even romantically—but too often felt they were denied by modern life was only denied to them as long as they failed to really understand their longings. They could come to better understand them through the study of great works of literature.
Amy’s teaching and writing were driven by the conviction that the stories we tell shape our souls and bind us together, and by the worry that we too often now fail to take care about how our souls are shaped and how (or whether at all) we are bound together in community. She tried to help her students realize that what they longed for—intellectually, spiritually, even romantically—but too often felt they were denied by modern life was only denied to them as long as they failed to really understand their longings. They could come to better understand them through the study of great works of literature.
You can find all the tributes here.
Update: Gary Schmitt and Karlyn Bowman share their thoughts over at the American Enterprise Institute. Here’s an excerpt from Schmitt:
Leon’s and Amy’s reputation as seminar teachers, of course, was well known among their former students and colleagues. But, as the saying goes, one had to see it to believe it.
Perhaps the first time I truly saw them in action was at a conference the Citizenship Program held at Montpelier, the home of James Madison, with a wide variety of professional development programs for high school civic teachers. Over a lunch, Leon and Amy led the group through a discussion of the fictional short story, “The Man without a Country,” by Edward Everett Hale, showing in practice how, when properly led, such a seminar could raise for students understandable but still profound questions about citizenship and attachment to one’s country.
Particularly striking was their capacity to so smoothly but quickly get even the most skeptical of the educators around the table to fully engage, put forward their ideas about the story, and then watch their excitement grow as new insights about what they had recently read popped into their heads. But, like the great teachers they were, Amy and Leon did not let the discussion become a free-for-all. Subtly, with a sure hand, they guided the participants down the most productive paths by asking the right questions and by picking out the substantive points to be pursued from comments that, at first blush, were less than insightful. In the end, not only had the conference participants been fed lunch. They also had been nourished in a fashion they almost certainly had not anticipated.
Perhaps the first time I truly saw them in action was at a conference the Citizenship Program held at Montpelier, the home of James Madison, with a wide variety of professional development programs for high school civic teachers. Over a lunch, Leon and Amy led the group through a discussion of the fictional short story, “The Man without a Country,” by Edward Everett Hale, showing in practice how, when properly led, such a seminar could raise for students understandable but still profound questions about citizenship and attachment to one’s country.
Particularly striking was their capacity to so smoothly but quickly get even the most skeptical of the educators around the table to fully engage, put forward their ideas about the story, and then watch their excitement grow as new insights about what they had recently read popped into their heads. But, like the great teachers they were, Amy and Leon did not let the discussion become a free-for-all. Subtly, with a sure hand, they guided the participants down the most productive paths by asking the right questions and by picking out the substantive points to be pursued from comments that, at first blush, were less than insightful. In the end, not only had the conference participants been fed lunch. They also had been nourished in a fashion they almost certainly had not anticipated.
