The Education of a Teacher

By combining autobiography with cultural history, English professor Howard Wolf takes us through the 1960s and up to the present much in the way a personal guide would lead us through a museum full of wonders. "The Education of a Teacher" traces Wolf's odyssey as he discovers his vocation, from his own college days to his tenure in a Turkish university as a visiting Fulbright scholar. The decades unfold for us: the cold war, student activism, Vietnam, and a trend toward student apathy all prepare us for the technological immediacy of the 1980s. Wolf was and is a passionate participant in the political, literary, and social events that have constituted our recent culture. This is a collection of essays about higher education and American culture that dramatises and humanises the often abstractly treated subject of education. Howard Wolf always tries to understand the classroom and the setting of his university in terms of the larger currents of the culture and to make his approach to literature and his students relevant to these currents. Wolf's connections between autobiography and the significant trends of our time enrich the historical record.