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Culture of the Land
Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place
Prominent author and cultural critic Wendell Berry is well known for his contributions to agrarianism and environmentalism, but his commentary on education has received comparatively little attention. Berry has been eloquently unmasking America's cultural obsession with restless mobility for decades, arguing that it causes damage to both the land and the character of our communities. Education, he maintains, plays a central role in this obsession, inculcating in students' minds the American dream of moving up and moving on.
Drawing on Berry's essays, fiction, and poetry, Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro illuminate the influential thinker's vision for higher education in this pathbreaking study. Each chapter begins with an examination of one of Berry's fictional narratives and then goes on to consider how the passage inspires new ways of thinking about the university's mission. Throughout, Baker and Bilbro argue that instead of training students to live in their careers, universities should educate students to inhabit and serve their places. The authors also offer practical suggestions for how students, teachers, and administrators might begin implementing these ideas.
Baker and Bilbro conclude that institutions guided by Berry's vision might cultivate citizens who can begin the work of healing their communities―graduates who have been educated for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity.
Drawing on Berry's essays, fiction, and poetry, Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro illuminate the influential thinker's vision for higher education in this pathbreaking study. Each chapter begins with an examination of one of Berry's fictional narratives and then goes on to consider how the passage inspires new ways of thinking about the university's mission. Throughout, Baker and Bilbro argue that instead of training students to live in their careers, universities should educate students to inhabit and serve their places. The authors also offer practical suggestions for how students, teachers, and administrators might begin implementing these ideas.
Baker and Bilbro conclude that institutions guided by Berry's vision might cultivate citizens who can begin the work of healing their communities―graduates who have been educated for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity.
268 pages, Paperback
Published February 18, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 9, 2023
This is the best academic book I've read so far this year (it is June 9, 2023). I anticipate that I will be re-reading portions of this book frequently.
January 19, 2019
I'm going to be talking about this book with my (university) co-workers for a while.
While it clearly reads like it is written by two English professors (meticulously formed chapters with an intro based on one of Berry's fiction works, practical suggestions and wrapping up with a meditative dip into Berry's poetry), this books hits a lot of what is good about the liberal arts and whole-person education.
Perhaps I liked this book so much because I was already on board with its premise before I heard of it. I just put together a presentation for students based on my master's thesis in which I encourage students to think not so much about how college can prepare them to get a good job and make money, but how college can prepare them to serve others.
Bilbro and Baker do an excellent job of distilling Berry's philosophy and fiction into an incisive critique of higher education culture. They focus on what David Brooks calls eulogy virtues rather than the resume virtues that universities are currently known for. They highlight how Berry is correct that many universities are largely servants of corporations: training workers and sorting knowledgeable people to be hired into the system of capitalism.
But universities are more about developing whole people, who care for their place and people around them. It's a Christian calling and while the authors and Berry are Christian, the book is not evangelistic in tone. It simply resides in the knowledge that all truth is God's truth.
The main draw back is if you are currently unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, you may be lost. The authors reference his fiction at length and their brief introductions may suffice for the most attentive readers, but those who know Berry's stories already will get the most out of this book's arguments.
While it clearly reads like it is written by two English professors (meticulously formed chapters with an intro based on one of Berry's fiction works, practical suggestions and wrapping up with a meditative dip into Berry's poetry), this books hits a lot of what is good about the liberal arts and whole-person education.
Perhaps I liked this book so much because I was already on board with its premise before I heard of it. I just put together a presentation for students based on my master's thesis in which I encourage students to think not so much about how college can prepare them to get a good job and make money, but how college can prepare them to serve others.
Bilbro and Baker do an excellent job of distilling Berry's philosophy and fiction into an incisive critique of higher education culture. They focus on what David Brooks calls eulogy virtues rather than the resume virtues that universities are currently known for. They highlight how Berry is correct that many universities are largely servants of corporations: training workers and sorting knowledgeable people to be hired into the system of capitalism.
But universities are more about developing whole people, who care for their place and people around them. It's a Christian calling and while the authors and Berry are Christian, the book is not evangelistic in tone. It simply resides in the knowledge that all truth is God's truth.
The main draw back is if you are currently unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, you may be lost. The authors reference his fiction at length and their brief introductions may suffice for the most attentive readers, but those who know Berry's stories already will get the most out of this book's arguments.
January 7, 2026
Really lovely book. I hope many who find themselves working in education will read it.
October 26, 2024
Decent introduction to Berry; decent thoughts on education. It for sure gave me some good things to think about, and I appreciate the effort and care put into the book. Some parts were shallow or impractical, but not so on the whole. While I wouldn’t say it’s the best book on education or the liberal arts, I’m glad I read it!
April 19, 2019
Great Analysis and Application of Berry to Higher Education
The authors provide balance, yet challenge the reader to reckon with Berry’s prophetic voice of reason for the cultivating of the mind and body.
The authors provide balance, yet challenge the reader to reckon with Berry’s prophetic voice of reason for the cultivating of the mind and body.
March 28, 2023
Wendell Berry's hopes for education and learning, for community and place, are compelling and likely necessary. Baker and Bilbro do a fair job of assembling his various speeches, essays, and fiction to form a coherent whole to this vision, and then call for its possible applications to the university.
Even so, while the gathering of Berry's wisdom is a worthy endeavor, even if captured in uninspired chapter-structure templates, the authors' interpretations of his fiction as themes and lessons which apply are often strained, stretched. It is as if, once they decided to use his novels and stories as exemplars of the facets of pedagogy, they then sought long to force a work to fit.
Worse, though, Baker and Bilbro, both from Michigan's Spring Arbor University, have limited Berry's vision in sometimes crippling ways. Part of this is from their seeming "alliance" in Christian thinking: Berry's work is fairly devout, and so the evangelistic authors presume to root his pedagogy almost exclusively in traditional Christian Western models of thinking. I counted, for instance, only two brief references to Buddhism as the only moments where they dared to think outside of their own campus. When discussing foundations of the "tree of wisdom," for instance, they quickly and unreflectively presumed to offer Aristotelian and Socratic structures and Greco-Roman grammars. Well, what else would one ever consider as bringing us to a place of . . . virtue?
Yes, one might claim, they follow Berry's recommendations to knowledge of local traditions; yet over and over again, while pursuing the fraught concepts of Tradition, Hierarchy, Geography, Community, and Service, only the conservative Christian ethic is voiced. In brief, the vision of Baker and Bilbro is quite near-sighted, especially when the global commons and its people are at stake.
It may be that Berry, too, has this limitation in his pedagogy, but the excerpts from his speeches and other works did not lead me to this conclusion. If anything, Berry appears a Christian guided by his personal virtue and love of community, more an ethicist than narrow-minded evangelist.
All of this is most unfortunate, since this is the only book I know of which gathers Berry's work in this way. And the stakes are high: Berry and the authors are quite right to be highly concerned about the materialistic and profit-seeking model which has come to monopolize the testing and production of students, not just at the university but at the public school level, as well. By divorcing students from place, from planet, from relationships, from community, from considering (dare we say it) love as an inherent part of the decision-making process, we have come to produce the past few generations of thinkers as consumers of the worst sort, "entrepreneurs" who think of the short-term profit over the ethic of reflective engagement in the world.
There is room for not merely more scholarship here, but real reach and daring proposals for reform of our schooling. The authors do not have this reach, and all they can scrape up as resolve is hopeful words that instructors attempt such work each on their own.
Even so, while the gathering of Berry's wisdom is a worthy endeavor, even if captured in uninspired chapter-structure templates, the authors' interpretations of his fiction as themes and lessons which apply are often strained, stretched. It is as if, once they decided to use his novels and stories as exemplars of the facets of pedagogy, they then sought long to force a work to fit.
Worse, though, Baker and Bilbro, both from Michigan's Spring Arbor University, have limited Berry's vision in sometimes crippling ways. Part of this is from their seeming "alliance" in Christian thinking: Berry's work is fairly devout, and so the evangelistic authors presume to root his pedagogy almost exclusively in traditional Christian Western models of thinking. I counted, for instance, only two brief references to Buddhism as the only moments where they dared to think outside of their own campus. When discussing foundations of the "tree of wisdom," for instance, they quickly and unreflectively presumed to offer Aristotelian and Socratic structures and Greco-Roman grammars. Well, what else would one ever consider as bringing us to a place of . . . virtue?
Yes, one might claim, they follow Berry's recommendations to knowledge of local traditions; yet over and over again, while pursuing the fraught concepts of Tradition, Hierarchy, Geography, Community, and Service, only the conservative Christian ethic is voiced. In brief, the vision of Baker and Bilbro is quite near-sighted, especially when the global commons and its people are at stake.
It may be that Berry, too, has this limitation in his pedagogy, but the excerpts from his speeches and other works did not lead me to this conclusion. If anything, Berry appears a Christian guided by his personal virtue and love of community, more an ethicist than narrow-minded evangelist.
All of this is most unfortunate, since this is the only book I know of which gathers Berry's work in this way. And the stakes are high: Berry and the authors are quite right to be highly concerned about the materialistic and profit-seeking model which has come to monopolize the testing and production of students, not just at the university but at the public school level, as well. By divorcing students from place, from planet, from relationships, from community, from considering (dare we say it) love as an inherent part of the decision-making process, we have come to produce the past few generations of thinkers as consumers of the worst sort, "entrepreneurs" who think of the short-term profit over the ethic of reflective engagement in the world.
There is room for not merely more scholarship here, but real reach and daring proposals for reform of our schooling. The authors do not have this reach, and all they can scrape up as resolve is hopeful words that instructors attempt such work each on their own.
November 5, 2024
Baker and Bilbro's Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place, is strong and provocative. It is a call for a different kind of education, one that reorients the institutions of higher learning--students, faculty, and staff.
Baker and Bilbro deliberately avoid a religious framework for their critique, choosing instead, obviously, to approach education from Wendell Berry's point of view. I am no expert on Berry, to put it mildly. I have more familiarity with the Southern Agrarians that grew out of Vanderbilt, including Robert Penn Warren. Berry's agrarianism seems more consciously ecological and egalitarian, but Berry shares, and is animated by, their concern for localism, tradition, and the impact of industrialization.
Baker and Bilbro carry Berry's concerns into academia, and I find it effective and convicting. While there is no question that universities strain under the demands of business, as they must if they hope to stay alive, the value of efficiency too often dominates competing values. In some ways, the very scale of education when there are tens of thousands of students and thousands of faculty members, makes meaningful community difficult. The best education, I firmly believe, takes place in small classroom with motivated students and a professor in trusted and respectful conversation over life's most important questions. It is an education to transform the soul.
Any answers to these questions, Berry (and Baker and Bilbro) believes, must include a sense of place, conscious roots, and a loving approach to learning. After all, Berry thinks that learning done to glorify the self, exercise power, or simply to satisfy curiosity, is not enough. Learning demands the love of others, even to the point of communicating truths in ways that are accessible and influential to your community.
The book is not perfect, by any means, but it is interesting and clearly the product of deep, defensible thinking. I recommend it.
Baker and Bilbro deliberately avoid a religious framework for their critique, choosing instead, obviously, to approach education from Wendell Berry's point of view. I am no expert on Berry, to put it mildly. I have more familiarity with the Southern Agrarians that grew out of Vanderbilt, including Robert Penn Warren. Berry's agrarianism seems more consciously ecological and egalitarian, but Berry shares, and is animated by, their concern for localism, tradition, and the impact of industrialization.
Baker and Bilbro carry Berry's concerns into academia, and I find it effective and convicting. While there is no question that universities strain under the demands of business, as they must if they hope to stay alive, the value of efficiency too often dominates competing values. In some ways, the very scale of education when there are tens of thousands of students and thousands of faculty members, makes meaningful community difficult. The best education, I firmly believe, takes place in small classroom with motivated students and a professor in trusted and respectful conversation over life's most important questions. It is an education to transform the soul.
Any answers to these questions, Berry (and Baker and Bilbro) believes, must include a sense of place, conscious roots, and a loving approach to learning. After all, Berry thinks that learning done to glorify the self, exercise power, or simply to satisfy curiosity, is not enough. Learning demands the love of others, even to the point of communicating truths in ways that are accessible and influential to your community.
The book is not perfect, by any means, but it is interesting and clearly the product of deep, defensible thinking. I recommend it.
March 31, 2023
I read this for an in-service assignment and enjoyed it very much. Whenever I read Berry, I feel he's a dreamer (which is ok because I am too), but he doesn't seem to acknowledge the complexity of people's realities. And he seems to have no room for Jesus' command to go into all the world. I think Berry overstates his ideas to make the point that we should love the land and belong to communities, but he doesn't go far enough in nuancing those points.
Baker and Bilbro do that work of nuance in this book. They sift his ideas and apply them to the values and goals of higher learning. They call us to value faithfulness, gratitude, and humility for ourselves and our students. The last chapters on geography and love were particularly relevant and energizing. We can model making connections with people and cultures for the purpose of loving them, and serving their needs ("What is your agony?"), instead of collecting and storing pieces of knowledge and calling that education or learning. To deeply know something or someone is to love them and live into the command to love our neighbor.
Baker and Bilbro do that work of nuance in this book. They sift his ideas and apply them to the values and goals of higher learning. They call us to value faithfulness, gratitude, and humility for ourselves and our students. The last chapters on geography and love were particularly relevant and energizing. We can model making connections with people and cultures for the purpose of loving them, and serving their needs ("What is your agony?"), instead of collecting and storing pieces of knowledge and calling that education or learning. To deeply know something or someone is to love them and live into the command to love our neighbor.
January 2, 2020
This book is quite good, but no better than its source material. I appreciated the occasion to revisit Berry’s work, but I don’t know that I learned anything that I would not have known apart from the primary material. Still, a good book for administrators and faculty alike to reflect upon.
December 6, 2017
I love Wendell Berry, and our evangelical culture needs more engagement with his thought. In a culture marked by restlessness and consumerism, this book on “cultivating virtues of place” is an oasis.
September 26, 2021
A lovely book on how Berry's literature encourages a new (or, better said, old) vision of education as virtuous formation.
September 15, 2017
Our universities. Our education. We don't have to make it more expensive to make it intelligent. When are the refusals going to start coming. That would be really radical. We've become our careers - we are trained as a "living" - resume' virtues- where in the process of becoming something ; we are nothing- where we feel excluded even when we are "in it" - how bout knowledge for 💓 rather than competition - how bout knowledge as living participation rather than exploitable control - how bout we stop reciting facts and start healing our contexts. It's a new soundtrack - dance to the beat - turned away from it all. Like a blind man. Under pressure 🎶🎶
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews