Just when I had assumed that the Ukraine war was settling into a stalemate in which each would try to bleed the other dry until some sort of negotiated settlement became preferable to lobbing artillery at each other, came news that Wagner PMC founder Evgeny Prigozhin has instigated some sort of coup. I do not have any definitive information about what provoked this extraordinary (and probably suicidal) gambit, but it proves yet again that wars that do not end quickly will take unexpected turns against the power that starts them. It is not fate or karma repaying the aggressor for their crimes but the result of the unique political pressures generated by war.

Wars play out on both the battlefield and civil society. The satisfaction of the need to mobilize the population to support the war physically, with their bodies, and morally, with their minds, requires the war be justified. The typical justification takes the form of the claim that there was no choice but to go to war (necessity) and that the prestige and dignity of the nation is at stake (justice). The longer the conflict goes on, the more of the second plank of the justification becomes dangerous for those who ordered the war.

Putin’s playbook has leaned heavily on the anachronistic idea of Russia as a great power. As the whole world can now see, it is a regional power dependent upon an extractive economy, with all the political-economic vulnerabilities to the customers for the products of its forests, wells, and mines that entails. While Russia’s economy did not collapse in the way that Western powers had hoped, it is in recession and the longer term effects of technology embargoes will continue to cause damage, possibly for decades. Markets especially dislike uncertainty, and armed insurrections, even if put down fairly quickly, are about as uncertain as societies can become.

I will be interested to see what China’s reaction to this coup attempt will be. Russia is uniquely dependent upon the Chinese market after being cut off almost completely from Europe and if there is one value above all that the Chinese leadership cherishes, it is stability. China has adopted a very cautious approach to the war, not condemning it but hardly vocally supporting it. Access to the US and European markets remains essential to China’s development (witness the productive talks between China and Blinken last week). This clear split in the Russian political and military leadership will most likely cause China to further distance themselves from the growing debacle.

Whatever the precipitating cause, it seems clear that the stalled war underlies the problem. Putin has staked Russia’s reputation on victory, but since the opening month of war has only lost ground (Kharkov and Kherson). His only “victories” since the first month have been, how shall we put this, pyrrich conquests of Melitopol and Bakhmut that required the total destruction of the cities at the cost of tens of thousands of lives on both sides and did not change the strategic balance on the battlefield. Nothing Russia does short of using nuclear weapons will change that strategic balance, because they are not fighting Ukraine, they are fighting the combined economic, political, and military might of NATO. There is no chance that NATO will abandon Ukraine the way that the US abandoned Afghanistan. There is simply too much, ideologically, at stake in this conflict for them to walk away. Weapons will continue to flow into the war zone until something that they can sell as victory has been achieved.

The coup attempt will also comes as bad news for those who, naively and without historical foundation, believe that Russia’s war in Ukraine is some sort of heroic anti-imperialist struggle. Putin has tried to sell it as such, but how reconquest of the lands of the Tsarist empire counts as anti-imperialism is beyond me. As the great American realist international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau wryly noted decades ago,the surest sign that a government is pursuing an imperialist policy is their claim to be anti-imperialist. Genuine anti-imperialist struggles are waged by popular forces struggling to free their nation from domination by foreign powers. The Russian speaking population of the Donbass could more plausibly claim to have been engaged in a legitimate national struggle, but Putin largely ignored it until he felt his struggle against NATO forced his hand. What we are witnessing– tragically, for civilians and soldiers on all sides– is an inter-imperialist conflict wasting lives for the sake of expanding or maintaining its sphere of influence.

Until this morning I had assumed that the conflict would end, grotesquely, with something like a reversion to the status quo ante of 2014. Russia would keep Crimea and claim victory on those grounds and some sort of federal relationship would be established between the Donbass and the Kiev government. Not formally losing those oblasts would allow Ukraine to claim its share of victory. Grotesque because it would have been an outcome that could have been achieved through negotiations now it is anyone’s guess how Prighozin’s move will affect the war. I cannot think of any possible world in which this fracture helps Russia.

Banal though the conclusion may be but it is nonetheless true: war is the ultimate destabilizer. It may be, as Von Clauswitz argued, politics by different means, but it is a means best avoided.

As I was writing this review, news arrived that Cormac McCarthy died. He was rightly celebrated as one of the giants of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. Only a master could treat characters who commit acts of shocking violence with something that approaches tenderness. I do not know another author who could arouse sympathy for a murderous necrophiliac, but McCarthy does just that in Child of God. Without ever excusing the character’s crimes, he manages to make us resonate with the feeling that no one deserves to be reduced to the status of a hunted animal, and that there is as much evil in the righteous lynch mob as there is in the guilty criminal that they pursue. One shudders to think of the crime against art that “sensitivity readers” would have perpetrated on McCarthy’s excavations deep into the human heart of violent darkness had his manuscripts been subjected to such an abomination. These are not children’s books for moralistic minds nourished on platitudes.

However, at the risk committing a crime myself– disciplinary chauvinism– even authors as outstanding as McCarthy can sound naive when they draw general philosophical principles from the behavior of the characters of their novels.

In one of the rare interviews that he granted, McCarthy articulated the philosophical conviction that he explored throughout his literary career.

“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Anyone with a even a passing understanding of history would agree that there has been no such thing as life without bloodshed, but one cannot infer from that historical fact that future harmony is impossible. Even if it is true that the causes of violence are psychological as much as social, it is not the case that life is nothing but bloodshed. If there were no harmony there would be no life.

One of the main duties of literature is to explore the terrifying motivations which lurk deep in everyone’s character. One of the main duties of philosophy (and history, to which it is allied) is to study the conditions in which our potential for brutality and violence becomes actual. Even if the ideal conditions in which peace and harmony universally prevail can never be achieved, we must struggle for them, because the goods of life presuppose them.

McCarthy was not a gunslinger, robber, or necrophiliac murderer. He invented his characters in the (more or less) quiet, peaceful repose of his study (or wherever it was that he felt inspired to write). While some have written in the trenches (David Jones, for example), art is typically created far from the battlefield. To be sure, as Hegel said, history is the slaughterhouse of nations, but before we can kill each other, we must grow to maturity: we must eat and learn; someone must cared for us. If we are to eat and learn and be cared for, we must build and maintain institutions that satisfy our needs. If we are lucky, we will also have been loved before we are sent off to kill. Beneath episodes of explosive violence, therefore, is what John McMurtry calls the “life-ground of value.”

The main problem of human history, when it comes to dealing with the causes of mass violence, is to universalize the feelings which allow the members of smaller groups to work together cooperatively and to care for one another’s well-being. Thus far, practical successes have been partial at best and few and far between. Ideologically, there are many universalist and humanist philosophies and religions, but none have been successfully translated into stable political institutions. Notwithstanding this failure, the belief in peace and harmony are certainly not the cause– as McCarthy suggests– of the loss of soul and freedom. On the contrary: people lose their freedom to conquerors and dominating classes and nations, and they lose their soul when they desire to become conquerors and members of dominating classes and nations. The desire for peace and harmony is the opposite: a desire to globalize the conditions for free self-creation, collaboration, mutual learning, and collective development.

My thoughts have been drawn repeatedly to problems of war and peace this past year because of the war in Ukraine. There seems little prospect for peace in the coming year. As with all wars, this one too will end, but as with most regional conflicts between adversaries incapable of landing a crushing blow on the opponent, its outcome will most likely return the combatants to some version of the status quo ante. This likelihood is morally criminal and irrational: had all parties exercized more patience and took each others concerns serious, the most probable outcome would have been achieved without military violence.

However it ultimately turns out, this war was hardly necessary. NATO had no reason to attack Russia, Russia was no threat to Europe as a whole, and Ukraine, like every nation, can decide for itself with whom it will ally economically and politically. Had NATO been disbanded when it should have been– at the end of the Cold War– Ukraine’s membersship would not have become a causus belli. But like a ball rolling down a hill political and ideological mindsets move with inertial force without worrying about the damage they will causes when they run into an obstacle. Had anachronistic Cold War calculation given way to a more rational assessment of respective national interests, the civil war in Ukraine could have been resolved by the federal solution envisaged in Minsk accords, Russian security concerns addressed by the negotiations that Russia requested and the West rejected, and Ukraine left to negotiate what relationships it desired with Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world. The current conflict is neither the noble crusade against Western imperialism that Russia’s supporters fantasize it to be nor a heroic struggle for self-determination. Ukraine is being cynically used to weaken Russia while Russia appeals to the historic borders of the Tsarist empire– the one denounced by Lenin, recall– as justification for its annexations. Coherent anti-imperialism must condemn all sides and demand negotiations to end the violence. Nothing hardens reactionary nationalist sentiment than war.

In other words, the conflict could have been avoided had decision makers thought rationally about the causes of the tensions and addressed them with constructive policy. The importance of rational understanding connects the themes of war and peace to the second focus of the past year’s posts: the continuing precarity of philosophy and the humanities and the growing threats to academic freedom that plague the university system in Canada, the US, and the UK. Just when the world needs comprehensive intelligence most, the institutional future of the discipline that takes its cultivation as its primary focus– is threatened. I worry that a vicious circle has set it: demographic and economic forces continue to cause enrollments in the humanities to drop; falling enrollments lead to program cuts, program cuts make recruitment more difficult, enrollments continue to fall, and administrators make more cuts.

My concerns are partially self-interested– I make my living as a philosophy professor. However, beyond my own career needs I remain convinced that the fundamental problems that the world faces today, from climate change, to armed conflict, to growing material inequality, to the general malaise that has seized the populations of the liberal-democratic world, and the economic and cultural dislocations that developing artificial intelligence technologies are already causing cannot be solved without a radical transformation of values and goals. I respect the achievements of my scientific colleagues and am awe-struck by the insights of the natural sciences, but only philosophy and the humanities generally can discover and defend the universal human values that alone can motivate and shape solutions to any of those defining problems.

I seem to have settled in to a pattern of publishing about 2 posts a month. As I have said before, I do not want to write to a schedule but only when the spirit moves me and I think that I have something to say. I also think that the world could benefit from less writing and more thinking and listening.

I was in Killarney on Georgian Bay at the beginning of June and spent an afternoon by the water reading a novel. I love painting and music, but if some demon were to force me to choose between them and literature I think that I would choose literature. Books were my internet as a boy: no pictures save the one’s I imagined of alien planets and distant cities. In the silent interior dialogue with the poem or novel the mind becomes wonderfully open to imaginary worlds. The stream of consciousness is enriched in unpredictable ways. When you read you have to be quiet, sit still, and keep yourself receptively open to what unfolds– dying arts in our hyperactive world.

Because I like to collect things and because I think I occasionally hit on an argument or image that might be worth preserving I have, as in years passed, collected last years posts here. Thank you for reading and I look forward to the next year: lucky thirteen for the blog.

Howard Woodhouse is Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of the Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit in the Department of Educational Foundations, University of Saskatchewan. Critical Reflections on Teacher Education is both a resume of his long career as a philosopher and teacher and a diagnosis and suggestions for cures of the malaise of the school system and teacher education. In this slim but complex volume he argues that the continued intrusion of capitalist market values into schools has extended to the curriculum and methods of faculties of education. If left unchecked, this tendency will undermine the capacity of future teachers for critical reflection and autonomous judgement, turning them into little more than transmission belts for government policy and corporate interests. “Without a basic understanding of philosophical issues and their relationship to educational practice” he writes, new teachers “will become lost in the demands of hierarchical school systems that emphasize conformity to rules and policies, which negate the necessary autonomy of qualified judgement defining their profession.” (1)That this transformation would negate the vocation of educators to enable students’ intellectual growth is of no concern to today’s self-styled “reformers.” Woodhouse’s argument alerts educators to the crisis, explains the importance of philosophy to teacher education, and makes a number of practical suggestions for the transformation of classrooms at all institutional levels.

He supports his argument with evidence drawn from his own long career as a philosopher, from the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell (and to a lesser extent, John Dewey), the philosophy for children movement, and the place-based educational philosophy and practice of Indigenous communities from whom he has learned in Saskatchewan. He integrates these distinct strands of argument by showing how they are forms of “life-value,” a term he adopts from the work of John McMurtry. McMurtry’s epochal philosophical achievement was to have demonstrated that all values are functions of the needs and capacities of living, sentient beings. Whatever is of value either serves living things as a resource that satisfies their needs or is an expression of their sentient, intellectual, or creative capacities. The Russell’s’ understanding of education as growth, the cultivation of the philosophical capacities of children, and the First Nation’s understanding that scientific knowledge grows up out of lived experience of the nurturing power of the land are all expressions of this underlying principle.

His latest critique of the intrusion of market values into the educational system extends the reasoning of his previous book, Selling Out, from the university system into the primary and secondary school systems. Both books build on the pioneering argument of McMurtry’s “Education and the Market Model” (Paideusis, 1991). In that seminal paper, McMurtry contrasted the values that rule the capitalist market place (all goods are understood as saleable commodities available for purchase by anyone willing to pay the price) with the value that organizes educational systems (the growth of intellect and sensibility through conjoint efforts with teachers in structured but open-ended inquiry). As is evident, the value that organizes educational systems is undermined to the extent that market values invade. To become educated, students must struggle to understand; the burden of inquiry cannot be alleviated through a cash transaction. The work must continue until insight has been achieved, only to start again, in search of deeper and more comprehensive understanding. If education were a commodity then the insights could be purchased, but even if one could buy diplomas they would not acquire the cultivated intelligence that the piece of paper signifies. The problem is solved, McMurtry and Woodhouse both worry, by transforming the content of education. Instead of open ended inquiry schooling becomes a matter of mechanical skill acquisition, efficiently delivered and standardized tested.

The book is organized into five pithy chapters. Each begins with a short personal reflection that motivates the philosophical argument to come. Despite their concision, each is richly illustrated with appropriate historical evidence. The first chapter details the way in which the market model has infiltrated faculties of education in Canada, the UK, and the US. The consequence for future teachers is that their careers will be “reduced to that of technicians working to advance the goals of the market.” (11) However, even that reduction is only a first step. The ‘reformers’ ultimately aim at doing away with living teachers altogether. Woodhouse cites Robert Heterich, president of Educom, an academic-corporate consortium, who advocates “‘remov[ing] the human mediation … and replac[ing] it with automation’ … to reduce unit costs and programme students for the market.”(24) The emergence of ChatGPT perhaps brings this dream closer than educators might have feared.

To the objection that machines cannot teach because machines cannot think, technocrats will respond (as they do in the case of “artificial” intelligence), by redefining teaching as that which the teacher bot can do. Human intelligence is bound up with our self-conscious awareness of our vulnerable being-in-the-world. Therefore, it is not algorithmic, even if some basic operations can be formalized and replicated by machine functioning. All intelligent reflection and action is bound up with meaningful interpretation and caring interacting with the natural and social environment. However impressive the operations of technologies like ChatGPT, they are not alive, do not care, and therefore cannot produce meaningful interpretations of the problems their creators claim they can help solve. However, this objection disappears if intelligence is defined as the machinic assembly of sentences. If students are taught that intelligence is the execution of algorithms then, after a few generations, that is what everyone will believe intelligence is, and the existential basis of the criticism will be undermined.

The same fate awaits teaching if technocrats like Heterich win. All teachers have to rely on routines and rules of thumb which those who would eliminate the teacher believe can be formalized and programmed into a machine. However, as with human intelligence, the affective and communicative core of teaching would be eliminated. Teaching is not the efficient transmission of information; teaching is the multi-sided ability to frame problems in such a way that students form the desire to investigate it on their own. Only through their own efforts can students grow intellectually. The role of the teacher is to help them find their way into whatever problem is under investigation. If students are taught that education is simply the efficient assimilation of skills and data, then they will lose the affective connection to problems that genuine education stimulates. The result will be that the human project terminates in our having replaced ourselves with machines. What will replace the role of effort and striving as sources of meaning in our lives no one can say.

Woodhouse exposes the supreme danger of these trends. He anchors his alternative vision in the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell. Woodhouse demonstrates that, despite his occasional lapse into scientism, Russell was, at heart, a humanist and the educational philosophy that he and Dora developed placed the free development of the student at its centre. For the Russells, educational systems should be modelled on the principle of living development that governs the natural world: “The metaphor of growth runs throughout Bertrand and Dora’s educational philosophy … “the humanistic conception of education” they write ‘regards the child as a gardener regards a young tree … as something with an intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.”‘(34) Gardening is both joyous and terrifying: one plants the seeds in well-prepared ground but one cannot force them to grow. So too with teaching: the teacher prepares the ground by framing the problem in ways that the students can understand, but then must trust the students to do the work themselves. As the gardener cannot force the tree to grow, so too the teacher cannot brow beat the students to learn. Their task is not to force but to enliven the inner principle, the “desire to know” which, as Aristotle said, lies at the root of human relationship to the world.

Even when well-intentioned, the move to turn teachers into testable skill-transmitters would destroy the nature of education. Anyone can memorize times tables; writing Principia Mathematica requires imagination and drive, not just mastery of the rules of formal logic. ChatGPT can assemble sentences, but until it feels the joy of awakening each morning and the utter desolation of the loss of a loved one, poetry will elude it. Education enables students to find their own voice: some as mathematicians, perhaps, and some as poets, but all as sensitive, reflective, confident but not dogmatic citizens of the world. To become educated is to become alive to the world as a question. Thinking is– as Dewey understood–active intervention into the order of things, the very opposite of parroting the correct slogan or learning what you need to say to get the job. The world will always exceed our grasp, but that is a good thing: the inherent questionability of things ensures that there will always be something meaningful for the next generation to do (as long as there is a next generation).

Despite Russell’s reputation as a stuffy and conservative analytic philosopher, criticism was central to his philosophical practice. “The essential characteristic of philosophy,” he argued, “which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life, it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it only accepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, no reason for rejecting them has appeared.”(32) One can immediately see the importance of this practice of philosophy for teachers and students. If education is not to degenerate into indoctrination, then teachers must be able to think critically about the curriculum they are being asked to teach, and to have the intellectual courage to oppose curricula that suffocates thinking under dogma. By being critical themselves they will instill in students the need to intervene when unsupported arguments circulate as facts or when narrow ideology demonizes and attacks. However, a genuinely critical practice is humbling: no one has all the answers, every position can be questioned, and when one is the target of criticism one knows that one owes one’s interlocutor a reasoned argument.

This capacity for (self)-criticism is central to the vocation of philosophy and education, but it can also– if it is practiced as an end in itself– conflict with philosophy’s positive, life-serving dimension. Life is not only opposition (although we must have the strength to oppose). Life is ultimately worth living because it is an opening to the beauty and magnificence of the universe. Social problems are problems precisely because they impede those who suffer from them from living– feeling, thinking, acting, relating, savouring, enjoying– to the fullest. The principle of life-enjoyment is the root which feeds all struggles. Criticism has to maintain connection with this root lest it degenerate into nihilistic skepticism or despair. Everything is open to challenge, true, but for the sake of expanding understanding, not drowning it in doubt. Woodhouse does not explicitly pose this sort of challenge to Russell’s definition of philosophy, but the final three chapters make clear that he is implicitly aware of these sorts of dangers.

The third chapter focuses on the principles and practices of the philosophy for children movement. First developed in distinct but related directions by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, the effort to incorporate philosophy at every level of education was motivated by the goal of freeing education from rigid bureaucratic structures. Instead of a teacher standing in front of the class drilling students until they can perform the appropriate repertoire, Lipman, Sharp, and their followers reconceived the relationship amongst learners as a “community of inquiry.”(61) Inspired in part by John Dewey’s understanding of education as problem-based inquiry, the proponents of philosophy for children wanted to turn the class room into an incubator of children’s native curiosity.(62) The teacher would be more shepherd and less drill sergeant and the child viewed as a unity of affect and intellect alive in wonder to the world, needing guidance but able to find their own way together with their co-explorers. Thinking of themselves as a community they would feel united in common purpose, but they would also understand that as a community of individual minds, each person sees the world from their own angle. Hence students would also discover for themselves the inevitability of disagreement, the need for dialogue, and respectful argument as the primary means for resolving disputes.

The movement has made some headway in Canada, the UK, the US, but Woodhouse is keen to stress that the trend has been away from philosophical education of any sort. Obviously, if teachers lack philosophical education they will be in no position to cultivate philosophical dispositions in their students. Philosophy is essentially a practice, not trivial familiarity with this or that thinker from the past. Woodhouse defends philosophy first as disposition and practice and second as an academic discipline. The life-value of the academic discipline is not expressed by the fact that exists but in the difference that it makes to those who study it. The development and nurturing of a philosophical disposition towards intelligent criticism in the service of truth and life-enjoyment must be the guiding idea.

No institution is more human than education. Animals learn but their cognitive capacities, no matter how impressive, are minute in comparison to human thought and feeling. It can expand to the edge of the universe and ask what still lies beyond; it can shrink to the size of a quark and imagine the world from that perspective; it is capable of the most tender and subtle refinements of meaning and a generator of metaphorical connection without limit, but poorly educated it is also capable of justifying genocidal violence. Thus, it is not hyperbole to argue that the human future depends upon the quality of our educational institutions and educators.

Woodhouse makes this connection between education and survival through the example of climate change. The final two chapters focus on the link between philosophical education for teachers and their ability to motivate students to understand the problem and become the sort of engaged citizens who can help solve it. In order to advance his argument, Woodhouse draws inspiration and insight from the place-based learning at the heart of Indigenous societies. Drawing on the knowledge of both Elders and Indigenous intellectuals, Woodhouse shows how the holistic (affective, intellectual, practical, and spiritual) understanding of the complex interrelationships upon which life depends must be integral to life-valuable climate change education. Woodhouse cites Marie Batiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood to explain the connection between Indigenous and “Western” science. “The traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples is scientific in the sense that it is empirical, experimental, and systematic. It differs in two important respects from Western science, however: traditional ecological knowledge is highly localized, and it is social. Its focus is on the web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, and landforms in a particular locality, as opposed to the discovery of universal laws.” (89) While I agree that this difference is real, I do not think that it is best understood as a difference between Indigenous and “Western” forms of science.

The more important point that Batiste and Youngblood are making here, I would say, is that science has a common, practical root. Chemistry does not originate with the periodic table, but with cooking and other forms of life-serving transformation of substances. Taxonomy does not begin with Linnaeus but with long-evolved local understandings flora and fauna and their uses. Medicine does not begin with the MRI machine but with caring attention to vulnerable bodies and the medicinal properties of plants. It is true that the science that has developed since Galileo and Newton demands generalization of results expressed as mathematically formalized regularities, but I think that this demand should be understood as continuous with and a development of that much longer practical history of science rather than as cliched “Western” alternative to older forms of knowing. The mathematical notations that supposed “Western” science employs are not Western in origin but Egyptian and Greek (geometry), Indian (the all important value of 0), and Arabic (algebra). Science, practical and mathematical, has always been an international and cross-cultural practice. Like all forms of knowledge (including religious and philosophical) science can be deployed in ideological ways to justify domination. The best means to oppose this very unscientific use of science is to demonstrate its deeper and more cosmopolitan origins rather than (ironically) allow “the West’ to take credit for the extraordinary and undeniable achievements of post-17th century mathematical natural science.

That said, the more important point is to insist upon the connection between genuine knowledge and the understanding, maintenance, and development of natural and social life-support systems. Woodhouse integrates the various strands of his argument by invoking McMurtry’s “primary axiom of value.” The axiom holds that all value whatsoever either serves life as a means of satisfying a need or expresses the sentient, intellectual, and creative powers of living things. The value of the engaged, reflective, and critical form of education that Woodhouse depends is clearly explained by the axiom. The human intellect needs education in order to develop its full range of abilities, and the educated person experiences life more fully, is capable of a greater range of activities, and is reflectively aware of the interests of others, other living things, and nature as a whole. Life cannot be lived anyway one wants or is able to pay for; since the world exists outside of our won minds and skins we must take into account the needs of others, contribute to their satisfaction in some way, and, overall, strive to live in way which are to “coherently inclusive” of the needs and goals of others.(98)

Education is our first and last line of defense. It must be approached as the hard but joyous work of exploring our universe and the problems of human social life together, in respectful but sometimes difficult argument. Cats and crows can master a few skills and we should admire them for it, but human intelligence is not the mastery of skills and teaching is not the transmission of information. If Covid taught teachers anything, it is that on line platforms are useful for transmitting information, but make actual pedagogical communication extremely difficult. The desire to learn develops best when living learners work together in shared space, challenging and inspiring each other to expand the circle of understanding ever wider.