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Full Idea
Culture - as we know it - is an instrument manipulated by teachers for manufacturing more teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
Gist of Idea
Culture is an instrument for creating an ongoing succession of teachers
Source
Simone Weil (The Need for Roots [1943], II 'Towns')
Book Ref
Weil,Simone: 'The Need for Roots' [Routledge 2002], p.68
A Reaction
Lot of truth in this. We tend to view our greatest successes in students who become academics and teachers. Culture is very much seen as something which must be 'transmitted' to each new generation.
| 19780 | We seem to have made individual progress since savagery, but actually the species has decayed [Rousseau] |
| 19839 | The flourishing of arts and letters is too much admired [Rousseau] |
| 14852 | Culture cannot do without passions and vices [Nietzsche] |
| 4495 | The high points of culture and civilization do not coincide [Nietzsche] |
| 20108 | Every culture loses its identity and power if it lacks a major myth [Nietzsche] |
| 20948 | Human cultures are organisms which grow, and then fade and die [Spengler, by Bowie] |
| 23846 | Culture is an instrument for creating an ongoing succession of teachers [Weil] |
| 23414 | Liberals say state intervention in culture restricts people's autonomy [Kymlicka] |
| 9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
| 15662 | The 'culture industry' is an advertisement for the way things are [Finlayson] |
| 20679 | We stabilise societies with dogmas, either of dubious science, or of non-scientific values [Harari] |
| 21432 | Culture is the struggle to agree what is normal [Gibson,A] |