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Jacques Barzun
(30 Nov 1907 - )
French-American writer and historian whose field of research was the history of modern European thought and culture. He advocated liberal arts studies rather than vocational courses.
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Science Quotes by Jacques Barzun (8 quotes)
For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its method; for the mass, it rested on its powers of explanation.
— Jacques Barzun
In Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964).
It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
— Jacques Barzun
Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964), 3.
Out of man’s mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
— Jacques Barzun
Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964), 110.
Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to “technical problems” in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use.
— Jacques Barzun
In The Culture We Deserve (1989), 9.
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
— Jacques Barzun
Teacher in America (1954), 16.
The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
— Jacques Barzun
Race(1937), 282.
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
— Jacques Barzun
Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991), 35. In Richard J. Cox, Managing Records as Evidence and Information (2001), 217.
Then I have more than an impression—it amounts to a certainty—that algebra is made repellent by the unwillingness or inability of teachers to explain why we suddenly start using a and b, what exponents mean apart from their handling, and how the paradoxical behavior of + and — came into being. There is no sense of history behind the teaching, so the feeling is given that the whole system dropped down readymade from the skies, to be used only by born jugglers. This is what paralyzes—with few exceptions—the infant, the adolescent, or the adult who is not a juggler himself.
— Jacques Barzun
In Teacher in America (1945), 82.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
