Apparently, the time between Christmas and New Year’s—from December 26 to the afternoon of December 31—is called ‘Twixmas’ or ‘Dead Week’ or ‘Feral Week.’ I didn’t know until late 2024 that this quasi-holiday had a name, let alone a google-searchable, semi-stable set of shared celebratory rituals, at least among white-collar workers. Even ChatGPT knew more about the tradition of Crimbo Limbo—another name for it—that I have been unknowingly carrying on for the past 25 years, preaching that this is a time to binge-watch shows or self-pamper or catch up on hobbies or even to just spend your days unsure of how to occupy your time. If online articles are to be believed, it would seem then that I along with many others have been offering up non-sacrifices to and singing the hymns of Twixmas for decades, without knowing what we’re doing. A mindless annual repetition of moves disconnected from meaning—that is the very heart of any set of activities that would dare call itself a holiday tradition.

The way I typically celebrate Twixmas is by buying and reading a bunch of books. Well, I buy a bunch of books and then stick most of them in a queue for future reading, which I get to eventually. Okay, well, I will get to all of them eventually, I promise. This book-buying habit of mine, incidentally, also has a name I didn’t know about until now—in informal Japanese it’s called Tsundoku—and it has a communal history too, as is demonstrated by this 1921 quote attributed, in part, to book collector Alfred Edward Newton:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired by passionate devotion to them produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity, and that this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish, an argument which some have used in defense of the giddy raptures invoked by wine.

Such giddy raptures overtook me a bit this year as I laid hands on a copy of Navaho Indian Ethnoentomology—a book which catalogs 701 insects that the Native American Navajo had at one time classified and committed to memory. I also got two books dealing with cultural evolution that seem promising. One is Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, by Gaia Vince, a U.K. journalist and science writer. The other book on cultural evolution is called On the Origin of Tepees, by science writer and filmmaker Jonnie Hughes. And rounding out my more serious Twixmas purchases, I picked up two education titles, the more valuable to me of which is, without a doubt, a book first published in 1935 called Education and Emergent Man, by one William Chandler Bagley. It is this book from whence the title of this episode, The Literature of Power, comes.

The main reason Bagley interested me is that you’ve likely never heard of him. While it’s probably true to say that a randomly selected American would not know who John Dewey is, it is also almost certainly true to say that John Dewey is much more widely known today than William Bagley—though both men were active at around the same time, both were known educators and authors with advanced degrees, and both worked in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Dewey was a much more prolific author than Bagley, writing more than four times as many books and around five times as many articles and essays, which may contribute to his wider recognition. But Dewey’s relative popularity compared with Bagley’s is not best explained by simply comparing the written output of the two men. Google’s Ngram dataset tells us that, in 1935, a year after the publication of Bagley’s Education and Emergent Man, John Dewey’s name was 116 times more likely to pass in front of a reader’s eyes than Bagley’s name. In 2022, it was 625 times more likely. And, although not as sharply, this difference in coverage between Bagley and Dewey no doubt applies to courses taught at the 1600 or so colleges of education across the United States as well.

The real reason, I suspect, for Bagley’s unpopularity relative to Dewey’s is that Bagley was much more sympathetic to ‘traditionalist’ ideas. He and a few similarly unknown contemporaries, like Isaac Kandel, Charles Judd, and Robert Ulich critiqued Dewey’s ‘progressive’ instructional orientation—especially those ideas that prioritized individualism over intellectual rigor—and argued instead for the importance of essential, foundational knowledge, teacher-led instruction, structured curricula and disciplined classrooms, and a more scientific approach to teaching and learning issues. To most Americans, then and now, these ideas belonged to the dull and stifling “literature of knowledge” rather than to the literature that speaks to “the understanding heart,” the literature of power.

The literature of power, versus the literature of knowledge, is a distinction brought first to us by Thomas De Quincey, in 1848. (Bagley cites Matthew Arnold who also wrote about the different literatures of knowledge and power. But Arnold came later and borrowed from the original source, De Quincey.) Thomas De Quincey was an English literary critic working in the early to mid-1800s. His expounding on the literature of knowledge and the literature of power occurs as a lengthy aside, really, in an essay on the poetry of Alexander Pope. But it is worth quoting almost in full—and marveling a bit, I would say, at how these thoughts neatly capture the tension, both past and present, of Bagley v. Dewey:

There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move: the first is a rudder; the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding, or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but proximately it does and must operate--else it ceases to be literature of power--on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally, by way of germ or latent principle, in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven—the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly--are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz., the literature of power. What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten. . . .

It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is concerned with what is highest in man; for the Scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or co-operation with the mere discursive understanding: when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak, not of the understanding, but of "the understanding heart," making the heart,—that is, the great intuitive (or nondiscursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite. Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of sufficient illustration. . . . It is certain that, were it not for the literature of power, these ideals would often remain amongst us as mere arid notional forms; whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration and germinate into vital activities The commonest novel, by moving in alliance with human fears and hopes, with human instincts of wrong and right, sustains and quickens those affections. Calling them into action, it rescues them from torpor. And hence the pre-eminency, over all authors that merely teach, of the meanest that proves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving. The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of knowledge is but a provisional work, a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit [while it behaved well]. Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable among men. . . . They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo. These things are separated, not by imparity, but by disparity. They are not thought of as unequal under the same standard, but as different in kind, and, if otherwise equal, as equal under a different standard. Human works of immortal beauty and works of nature in one respect stand on the same footing: they never absolutely repeat each other, never approach so near as not to differ; and they differ not as better and worse, or simply by more and less; they differ by undecipherable and incommunicable differences, that cannot be caught by mimicries, that cannot be reflected in the mirror of copies, that cannot become ponderable in the scales of vulgar comparison.

Though the words in this long digression from De Quincey likely did not influence Dewey directly, they—along with De Quincey himself—fit squarely within the Romantic movement, which did, indeed, greatly influence thinkers in the Progressive Era, like Dewey. Romanticism’s intense obsession with individualism and self-reliance, its reverence for the natural over the human-made, and its moral idealism can all be found in De Quincey’s words here—and then later in the ideas of John Dewey, all the way to present-day educational progressivism.

Let’s start with individualism, which is the most subdued of the three themes in De Quincey’s essay—and is the most difficult, I think, for Western educated audiences to problematize, given the extent to which individualism is the very water we moderns swim in. It takes great effort to even imagine an alternative to it. De Quincey had much less struggle with communalism than we do today, and he writes about the literature of power in both collective and individualistic terms. For example, he speaks of the literature of power as ‘concerned with what is highest in man’ and as having its field of action in the ‘great moral capacities of man.’ But he also says that you owe John Milton power through his poem Paradise Lost and talks of your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite.

Most revealing of De Quincey’s individualistic tack in the essay is his reference to ‘the understanding heart’ from the Hebrew Bible, which can be found in 1 Kings Chapter 3 (sometimes there as the discerning heart). This is the organ to which the literature of power speaks, and in the Late Iron Age, when the Books of Kings were being written, the heart was also the individual’s control center—the seat of an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and soul. Indeed, the understanding heart is generally associated with one individual, Solomon, who actually receives his legendary Solomonic wisdom—his understanding heart—right there in verses 9-12.

Romantic individualism awards us all an ‘understanding heart’ from birth, which is called out and developed by exposure to tragedy, romance, fairy tale, the innocence of a child, and, according to De Quincey, even the worst novel ever written. It is not amenable to mere teaching—unless it is indirect teaching—nor does it engage well with the mere discursive understanding or the mere arid notional forms brought to us by the literature of knowledge. The literature of power deals with the higher understanding, but always through affections, passions, desires, emotions, intuitions, fears, hopes, and instincts.

All of this is consonant with both Deweyan and modern-day progressive individualism in education. Bagley observed, in Education and Emergent Man, that

Both in theory and in practice American education has always leaned strongly toward individualism . . . the individual has, so to speak, overshadowed the welfare of the social group as a whole. The fine phrase, ‘equality of educational opportunity,’ has usually meant opportunity to ‘get ahead’—of others. The notion of organized education as an agency of social welfare and social progress has had far less influence in getting for education either public funds or private donations than has the slogan, ‘give every boy and girl a chance.’

And consider Bagley’s footnote to this quote in light of the educational fallout during the COVID crisis:

During the third year of the Great Depression it was repeatedly pointed out that the United States was the only important country that permitted schools to be closed and teachers to remain unpaid. Indeed certain countries that were at once backward and impoverished increased their educational budgets and their school-building programs at the very time that American schools were being closed and expenditures either cut to the bare bone or suspended entirely. The writer has suggested the hypothesis that American education has deified the individual and has for that reason become in effect a species of philanthropy. In other countries, investments in public education are more clearly recognized as a most significant form of social insurance. In times of great stress, the philanthropic motive loses much of its force; not so the more virile recognition of the importance of education as a safeguard of social stability.

If education is seen as a source of millions of individual charitable donations that help students ‘get ahead’ rather than as the engine of cultural cohesion, it will be among the first of the institutions from which we grab needed money and resources when the going gets tough.

Like the Romantics and the Progressive Era individualists, modern educators talk ceaselessly about drawing intuitions out of students, not ‘transplanting’ knowledge from one mind to another. That’s mere teaching, merely giving information. A similar aversion to direct teaching, an attraction to engaging students’ passions, a fondness for stories and storytelling, and an obsession with higher forms of personalized understanding are all alive and well in modern education. These orientations, as Bagley notes, are meant to free individuals from the impersonal authoritative power of the state—to free them from uniformity, against which, as Bagley writes, “there has developed in American education a highly emotionalized prejudice . . . This has been compounded by contemporary educational theory, which has been outspoken against fixed curricula of any sort.”

Naturalness—or what is thought to be naturalness, anyway—is another Romantic theme that occupies De Quincey and modern-day education. For De Quincey, the quickly outdated knowledge needed to build a steam engine is contrasted with the power of ‘one lovely pastoral valley’ or of the tenderness, helplessness, innocence, and simplicity of children—characteristics which are ‘most alien from the worldly.’ Power is Paradise Lost, whereas knowledge is a wretched cookbook.

The literature of power, we are told, addresses itself to those seeds or germs or latent principles within all of us that must be allowed to develop naturally—a sentiment similar to one of the most retweeted quotes of all time in education; this, by Plutarch perhaps, not Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Bagley noted the same genuflections to naturalness almost 100 years later, in Dewey’s time:

The plan is simple [for progressives]. Education should follow the immediately felt needs of each learner, his present interests and desires. In meeting these immediate needs and feeding these interests and desires, learning activities will be generated in a thoroughly natural way, and in the course of a long series of such activities everything may be learned which the formal schools teach so awkwardly, unnaturally, and painfully.

Today, naturalness is quietly enforced in almost every situation by removing—or suggesting to remove—adult knowledge and guidance. So, education chatter is full to the brim with pleas to ‘honor’ students and their ‘agency,’ full of ideas about personalization and ways students can progress at their own pace, and full, truly, of an intense moralized anger toward direct or explicit instruction. “The efficiency of the teacher, indeed, has been measured in part by the talking that he did not do,” writes Bagley. “With the emphasis on projects and activities, the guidance function of the teacher became much more strongly emphasized than ever before, and the instructional functions were relegated still further into the background.”

Yet, because adult authority is indispensable in school and in the classroom (and in the world), the push to remove it or soften it is often channeled into cosmetic rather than practical reforms. Thus, students sit in pods facing each other rather than in rows facing the teacher, the teacher desk is removed, invented spellings and arithmetic are allowed to exist, for a time, explanations and corrections are simply reframed as wordy questions and discussions, and choices—with limited teacher- or standards-dictated options—are offered to students around learning agendas and assignments. In the background, students are of course compelled by law to be in school, grading systems, learning outcomes, and disciplinary recourses all remain teacher-directed, and students and parents continue to see teachers as institutional representatives and content arbiters. The result is a system of diffused authority where power operates through redesigned interfaces rather than diminished presence. Teacher authority and expertise, undissipated, are concealed and embedded in the learning environment, along with student success criteria, making them less visible to anyone not socialized in a white middle-class environment.

These two conditions of progressive thought about education—individualism and removing or de-centering adult authority, among others—are supported by a moral idealism that frames such thinking as better, ‘higher,’ wiser, and grander than the alternatives—the ‘higher understanding,’ the ‘higher functions of literature,’ the ‘grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests.’ It is concerned with ‘what is highest in man.’ Knowledge, on the other hand, ties you to the same plane, the same ‘ancient level of earth,’ is always provisional and in danger of collapsing, ‘whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power . . . [are] finished and unalterable.’ Knowledge is subject to the ‘scales of vulgar comparison,’ while power is ‘undecipherable and incommunicable’ and not directly teachable.

The effects of such moralizing around natural development and individual experience (and against knowledge) can be heard, as E.D. Hirsch, Jr. points out in his book American Ethnicity, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 operetta Pirates of Penzance:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General

I know the Kings of England and I quote the fights historical

From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical.

I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical.

About binomial theorem I am teeming with a lot o’ news,

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

Hirsch writes:

And the song goes on through integral and differential calculus, and Aristophanes, and cuneiform. But then the song slows down, and the major general concedes tunelessly that he knows nothing about modern warfare; that he can’t tell a rifle from a javelin; that his military knowledge only goes up to 1800; that he knows nothing of modern gunnery; and no more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery . . . Gilbert could confidently depend on his audience going along with the song’s attack on mere ‘rote’ book learning . . . towards the end of the 19th century, Gilbert wasn’t simply disparaging Major General Stanley’s lack of specific domain knowledge for his military craft. He was also exploiting America’s celebration of ‘real-world’ knowledge gained by one’s own instincts and experience and efforts. As John Dewey had phrased it in the 1890s—the general was not being guided by his own ‘instincts and powers’—instead he only knew a lot of book learning.

Hirsch might also have mentioned the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which touches on similar themes. The powers of the Wizard to confer courage, hearts, and brains are revealed to be a sham. The supplies needed for personal growth are gained during one’s individual journey and struggle; they are not taught from on high by scholarly wizards.

What, if any, are the alternatives to these Romantic and progressive notions? In the 200 years or so that we have covered, we have not heard from critics of either individualism or so-called naturalness—or both—any positive vision of an alternative to these ideals in education. The reason for this, as was mentioned at the beginning, is that the alternatives are much less attractive and seductive. Discipline, knowledge, teacher-led instruction, structured curricula, intellectual rigor, scientific approaches to instruction: these are not good backdrops for operettas or movies that anyone wants to see, except insofar as they place the hero in a boring, intimidating, or coercive ‘literature of knowledge’ prison from which the ‘literature of power’ sets them free.

It is worth, then, sketching out a charitable picture of what traditionalists have been arguing since De Quincey, since Dewey, and even today, if only to help us better understand the Romantic and Progressive waters in which we swim.

What traditionalists tend to see are communities rather than individuals, including a single global community. And instead of individuals exploring nature on their own, traditionalists see people primarily learning from and being influenced by others in their communities. De Quincey scolds the literature of knowledge for being always provisional and capable of only carrying us in steps along the same plane, but these are useful, not contemptible, aspects of shared knowledge within a community—knowledge helps to tether us all to the same reality and must always be open to correction and refutation. In pedestrian political discussions, when someone is caught complaining a little too much, maybe, about taxes, it has not been uncommon to hear, as a reply, that the tax hater must also be not too fond of roads and bridges and fire and police forces, let alone national defense or social services. Traditionalists in education might take the same approach: if you don’t like having to remember what a knowledgeable other tells you about algebra or germs or history or Jesus, and if you don’t like being judged on what you know by the group, then maybe you’re not too fond of civilization, because that’s how civilization—human civilization—works. And it’s the way it has worked from the very beginning of humanity.

Humans are primates. And primates live in social groups—well, some of them don’t, but we certainly do. And we evolved to live in groups, not as lone individuals. Our larger brains and our extended childhoods, compared with other primates, are both likely effects of our need to live in groups, track social dynamics, and learn from others. But we don’t really need to survey the research to convince ourselves of our desperate and innate need for others. We just have to pay attention and be honest with ourselves.

Those clothes you wear—did you make them yourself? What about the building or car you’re currently in? Did you make that? Even many, if not most, of the things you know exist solely because of testimony, or the word of others. Consider this passage written by Australian philosopher C.A.J. Coady in his 1992 book titled Testimony: A Philosophical Study:

I am visiting a foreign city that is new to me—Amsterdam will do. When I arrive at my hotel I am asked to fill in a form giving my name, age, date of birth, citizenship, passport number, and so on, all of which is accepted by the hotel clerk as true because I say it is and will be accepted by others as true because he says that I say it . . . More interestingly still, a good deal of the information that I give so confidently and authoritatively is accepted as true by me on the word of others. That I am so many years old; that I was born on such and such a date; that number H11200 does indeed correspond to the number the Australian passport authorities have in their files—none of these are facts of my individual observation or memory or inference from them. They are based, sometimes in a complex way, on the word of others.

My first morning in Amsterdam I wake uncertain of the time and ring the hotel clerk to discover the hour, accepting the testimony of the voice just as I would accept the institutional testimony of a clock or watch; being early for breakfast I read a paperback history book I have brought with me which contains all manner of factual claims that neither I nor the writer can support by personal observation or memory or by deduction from either: the deeds of a man called Napoleon Bonaparte who is supposed to have done all manner of astonishing things more than 150 years ago, many of his exploits being performed in places neither I, nor even perhaps the author, has ever visited and the reality of which is accepted on the word of others. Indeed, spurred to geographical thoughts, I reflect that on arriving at a strange airport a day or so earlier I had only the aircrew's word that this was Amsterdam, although since then there has been much else in the way of testimony to support their claim. Venturing forth from my hotel I consult a map and commit myself once more to a trust in my fellow human beings, just as I do moments later when I buy a copy of The Times and read about a military coup in Spain, an election campaign in Britain, an assassination in France, and a new development in medical science.

There is nothing in this tale that is personalized for the author. His name, age, passport number, etc., serve only to identify him at the hotel; they do not carve out a special personalized pathway for his journey. He is one among thousands who landed in Amsterdam that day—in the same way—among thousands, maybe, who picked up a copy of The Times, his breakfast is one that many hotel guests eat, his history book one that many people have likely bought and read—Coady’s everyday life, like ours, is lived as a member of a group and is supported, like ours, by a level of uniformity and predictability that should not surprise us at all when we know that we live in groups and not so much as lone individuals.

And what about authority? The author of the tale relies on others for virtually every move he makes and every item of knowledge he possesses. Would you—could you, even—really argue that it is different for you? Whatever else we can say about Romantic individualism and the de-centering of authority, we cannot, with a straight face, say that they are ‘natural.’

It may seem like we have strayed far away at this point from the literature of knowledge versus the literature of power, but that’s only because the literature of power is much less useful to us in our everyday lives. Perhaps its rarity makes it seem more precious, or perhaps knowledge is less of a show-off than power—working quietly behind the scenes while power takes all the credit. Consider the Amsterdam story again and think about all the things the author had to know to move about his day. Better yet, think about all the things you have to know to move about your day. It’s likely a difficult question, because we use our knowledge almost effortlessly—it is hidden from our view, and from our appreciation.

Can you even imagine what it would be like if you couldn’t read? Instructions for assembling furniture when the stupid pictures are no help, medicine and food labels, street signs, not to mention text messages, Emails, tax forms, recipes—no doubt people have been able to maneuver in the modern world without the ability to read, but it is incredibly costly in terms of extra time and extra people needed. In fact, in the United States, where 21% of the population is either illiterate or functionally illiterate, low literacy costs the country north of $2 trillion a year, because of reduced wages (and thus reduced tax contributions), any time poor literacy causes communication breakdowns in businesses or requires higher training costs, health care costs due to a greater frequency of accidents and low understanding of medical instructions, welfare costs, poorer financial choices, job shortages, and increased dropouts.

All of these issues are tied to poor literacy. If we include other knowledge, such as basic math and numeracy, time management, problem-solving skills, and social skills—all of which are learned in whole or in part from knowledgeable others—we can see that the costs of their absence begin to soar.

Knowledge and community truly underly everything. Rather than crushing individuality and stifling autonomy, knowledge and community enable them. Indeed, the literature of power is not possible without the literature of knowledge. How can Paradise Lost exercise and expand your latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite if you cannot read or understand it? How can you be moved by the innocence of children if you don’t know what innocence is—or its opposite? Tragedy, romance, and fairy tale cannot possibly restore to your mind the ideals of justice, hope, truth, mercy, and retribution if you don’t have the background knowledge necessary to understanding these stories let alone the ideals they are supposed to call forth and nurture.

For our students, too, it is the same story. While they, like us, can never live totally without others’ knowledgeable authority or community, they can, through knowledge, become knowledgeable authorities in their own right, helping to move their communities in beneficial directions—regardless of what they choose to do for a living. You don’t have to have a ‘high status’ to find freedom through knowledge. Individuality and independence are the sweet, somewhat illusory byproducts of understanding and thus taming the blooming, buzzing confusions of the world. They are not prizes to be awarded to the deserving.

I started this essay by identifying two traditions in which I was an unknowing participant—Twixmas and Tsundoku—and here at the end, I find myself a part of another tradition—a community of thinkers like Bagley, Kandel, Sweller, and Engelmann and their ideas—critiquing what we believe to be harmful orientations toward education. Perhaps you find yourself a part of the opposing tradition—with De Quincey, Rousseau, Dewey and their ideas—advocating for the ideals of individualism and autonomy for students. Yet we are bound together in a centuries-old tradition of debate about how best to educate the next generation and future generations. As soon as we acknowledge this reality—that we live in a traditionalist world—we can creatively embrace the literature of knowledge and help it to peacefully coexist with the literature of power.