Tag: Wendell Berry

‘The Objective’ As Read By Wendell Berry

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by Terry Heick

I recently attended a screening of a documentary on Wendell Berry at the Louisville Speed Art Museum.

Drew Perkins and I took in what was then called ‘The Seer’ back in July. Now titled ‘Look and See” out of, if I’m not mistaken, Berry’s reluctance to be the centerpiece of the film, by far the most moving bit for me was the opening sequence, where Berry’s sage voice reads his own poem, ‘The Objective’ against a dizzying and fantastic montage of visuals attempting to reflect some of the bigger ideas in the lines and stanzas.

The switch in title makes sense though, because the documentary is really less about Berry and his work, and more about the realities of modern farming–key themes for sure in Berry’s work, but in the same sense that farms and rustic settings were key themes in Robert Frost’s work: visible, but most powerfully as symbols in pursuit of broader allegories, rather than destinations for meaning.

See also Learning Through Humility

Anyone who has read any of my own writing knows what an extraordinary influence Berry has been on me as a writer, educator, and father. I created a kind of school model based on his work in 2012 called ‘The Inside-Out School,’ have exchanged letters with him, and was even fortunate enough to meet him last year.

Right, so, the film. You can purchase the documentary here, and while I think it misses on framing Berry for the widest possible audience, it is a rare look at a very private man and thus I can’t recommend it strongly enough if you’re a reader of Berry.

The problem of combining consumerism (ads, selling DVDs, selling books) isn’t lost on me here, but I’m hoping that the theme and distribution of the message outweigh any inherent (and woeful) irony when all of the pieces here are considered in sum. Also, there is a stanza that seems to be missing from the voice-over that I included in the transcription below.

The poem is taken from ‘A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems’ 1979-1997 published by Counterpoint Press in 1998.

The Objective

by Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake

of the objective–the soil bulldozed, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective,

the planners planned at blank desks set in rows.

I visited the loud factories where the machines were made

that would drive ever forward toward the objective.

I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies;

I saw the poisoned river–the mountain cast into the valley;

I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.

I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered footfalls of those

whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments

of those who had died in pursuit of the objective

and who had long ago forever been forgotten,

according to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten

forget that they have forgotten.

Men and women, and children now pursued the objective as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.

The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed,

were now free to sell themselves to the highest bidder

and to enter the best paying prisons in pursuit of the objective,

which was the destruction of all enemies,

which was the destruction of all obstacles,

which was to clear the way to victory,

which was to clear the way to promotion,

to salvation,

to progress,

to the completed sale,

to the signature on the contract,

which was to clear the way to self-realization, to self-creation,

from which nobody who ever wanted to go home would ever get there now,

for every remembered place had been displaced;

every love unloved,

every vow unsworn,

every word unmeant

to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated,

the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless with their many eyes

opened toward the objective which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,

having never known where they were going,

having never known where they came from.

From ‘A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems’ 1979-1997, by Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 1998

‘The Objective’ As Read By Wendell Berry

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Terrell Heick

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September 15, 2025
7 Ideas For Learning Through Humility
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by Terry Heick
Humility is an interesting starting point for learning.

In an era of media that is digital, social, chopped up, and endlessly recirculated, the challenge is no longer access but the quality of access—and the reflex to then judge uncertainty and “truth.”

Discernment.

On ‘Knowing’

There is a tempting and warped sense of “knowing” that can lead to a loss of reverence and even entitlement to “know things.” If nothing else, modern technology access (in much of the world) has replaced subtlety with spectacle, and process with access.

A mind that is properly observant is also properly humble. In A Native Hill, Wendell Berry points to humility and limits. Standing in the face of all that is unknown can either be overwhelming—or illuminating. How would it change the learning process to start with a tone of humility?

Humility is the core of critical thinking. It says, ‘I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion’ or ‘Let’s learn to reduce uncertainty.’

To be self-aware in your own knowledge, and the limits of that knowledge? To clarify what can be known, and what cannot? To be able to match your understanding with an authentic need to know—work that naturally strengthens critical thinking and sustained inquiry.

What This Looks Like In a Classroom

Analyze the limits of knowledge in plain terms (a simple introduction to epistemology).

Evaluate knowledge in degrees (e.g., certain, probable, possible, unlikely).

Concept-map what is currently understood about a specific topic and compare it to unanswered questions.

Document how knowledge changes over time (personal learning logs and historical snapshots).

Show how each student’s perspective shapes their relationship to what’s being learned.

Contextualize knowledge—place, circumstance, chronology, stakeholders.

Demonstrate authentic utility: where and how this knowledge is used outside school.

Show patience for learning as a process and emphasize that process alongside objectives.

Clearly value informed uncertainty over the confidence of quick conclusions.

Reward ongoing questions and follow-up investigations more than “finished” answers.

Create a unit on “what we thought we knew then” versus what hindsight shows we missed.

Analyze causes and effects of “not knowing” in science, history, civic life, or daily decisions.

Highlight the fluid, evolving nature of knowledge.

Differentiate vagueness/ambiguity (lack of clarity) from uncertainty/humility (awareness of limits).

Identify the best scale for applying specific knowledge or skills (individual, local, systemic).

Research Note

Research shows that people who practice intellectual humility—being willing to admit what they don’t know—are more open to learning and less likely to cling to false certainty.
Source: Leary, M. R., Diebels, K. J., Davisson, E. K., et al. (2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793–813.

Literary Touchstone

Berry, W. (1969). “A Native Hill,” in The Long-Legged House. New York: Harcourt.

This idea may seem abstract and even out of place in increasingly “research-based” and “data-driven” systems of learning. But that is part of its value: it helps students see knowledge not as fixed, but as a living process they can join with care, evidence, and humility.
Teaching For Knowledge, Learning Through Humility
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Terrell Heick

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September 4, 2025
Wendell Berry And Preparing Students For “Good Work”

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by Terry Heick

The influence of Berry on my life–and thus inseparably from my teaching and learning–has been immeasurable. His ideas on scale, limits, accountability, community, and careful thinking have a place in larger conversations about economy, culture, and vocation, if not politics, religion, and anyplace else where common sense fails to linger.

But what about education?

Below is a letter Berry wrote in response to a call for a ‘shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the argument up to him, but it has me wondering if this kind of thinking may have a place in new learning forms.

When we insist, in education, to pursue ‘obviously good’ things, what are we missing?

That is, as adherence to outcomes-based learning practices with tight alignment between standards, learning targets, and assessments, with careful scripting horizontally and vertically, no ‘gaps’–what assumption is embedded in this insistence? Because in the high-stakes game of public education, each of us collectively is ‘all in.’

And more immediately, are we preparing learners for ‘good work,’ or merely academic fluency? Which is the role of public education?

If we tended towards the former, what evidence would we see in our classrooms and universities?

And maybe most importantly, are they mutually exclusive?

Wendell Berry on ‘Good Work’

The Progressive, in the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the article by John de Graaf (“Less Work, More Life”), offers “less work” and a 30-hour workweek as needs that are as indisputable as the need to eat.

Though I would support the idea of a 30-hour workweek in some circumstances, I see nothing absolute or indisputable about it. It can be proposed as a universal need only after abandonment of any respect for vocation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.

It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with “jobs” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring—as well as inherently destructive. I don’t think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.

The old and honorable idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.

Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.

But aren’t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?

And isn’t that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?

And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?

More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?

And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?

A useful discourse on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:

What work are we talking about?

Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?

How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is employed in your work?

Do you respect the product or the service that is the result of your work?

For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or yourself?

What are the ecological and social costs of your work?

If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.

I don’t think anybody can honorably object to the proposition, in theory, that it is better “to reduce hours rather than lay off workers.” But this raises the likelihood of reduced income and therefore of less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can offer only “unemployment benefits,” one of the industrial economy’s more fragile “safety nets.”

And what are people going to do with the “more life” that is understood to be the result of “less work”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will exercise more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less.” This happy vision descends from the proposition, popular not so long ago, that in the spare time gained by the purchase of “labor-saving devices,” people would patronize libraries, museums, and symphony orchestras.

But what if the liberated workers drive more?

What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, television, electronic “communication,” and the various genres of pornography?

Well, that’ll be “life,” supposedly, and anything beats work.

Mr. de Graaf makes the further doubtful assumption that work is a static quantity, dependably available, and divisible into dependably sufficient portions. This supposes that one of the purposes of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the purposes of this economy has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into employees, and then to use the employees as cheaply as possible, and then to replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.

So there could be fewer working hours to divide, more workers among whom to divide them, and fewer unemployment benefits to take up the slack.

On the other hand, there is a lot of work needing to be done—ecosystem and watershed restoration, improved transportation networks, healthier and safer food production, soil conservation, etc.—that nobody yet is willing to pay for. Sooner or later, such work will have to be done.

We may end up working longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to survive.

Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky

Mr. Berry’s letter originally appeared in The Progressive (November 2010) in response to the article “Less Work, More Life.” This article originally appeared on Utne.

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Terrell Heick

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August 20, 2025
A New Definition For Equity In Education
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by Terry Heick

In a profession increasingly full of angst and positioning and corrective policy, there are few ideas as easy to get behind as equity.

Equal. Equality. Equity. Equilibrium. Equate. These are all fine ideas—each tidy and whole, implying their own kind of justice while connotating the precision of mathematics. Level. Same. Twin. Each word has its own nuance, but one characteristic they share in common is access—a level, shared area with open pathways that are equidistant to mutually agreed-upon currencies.

When discussing equity, there are so many convenient handles–race, gender, language, poverty, access to technology, but there may be a larger view that we’re missing when we do so.

Equity is the idea and goal of fairness and inclusion to provide all students with the resources, opportunities, and support they need to succeed, regardless of their background, abilities, or socioeconomic status. Unlike equality, which treats everyone the same, equity recognizes that students come from diverse circumstances and may require different approaches and resources to achieve similar outcomes.

The Scale of Equity

There isn’t a more global issue—equity being perhaps the global issue of our time. United Nation statistics published last year in The Economist put it plainly. While progress is being made in sub-Saharan Africa in primary education, gender inequality is in fact widening among older children. The ratio of girls enrolled in primary school rose from 85 to 93 per 100 boys between 1999 and 2010, whereas it fell from 83 to 82 and from 67 to 63 at the secondary and tertiary levels. And elsewhere, in Chad and the Central African Republic, there is a flat-rate of less than 70 girls for every 100 boys.”

This is a starkly different conversation about equity than the one we might have in the United States, the UK, Canada, or Australia. We have the luxury of becoming choosier, and harsher on ourselves, as progress is made, i.e., let’s first make sure there are free, quality schools everywhere, and that children can all read and write, and then at some point down the line we can concern ourselves with iPads vs Androids, or the broadband access in our poorest communities.

It’s easy to miss the scale of this as an ‘issue’ because unlike assessment, curriculum, teacher pay, class sizes, educational technology, or any other persistently evergreen edu-choke point, equity never stops affecting. It’s both the center and periphery of everything because we’re always who we are, where we are.

The Cultural Effect

As a species, we express ourselves through differences. What makes ‘culture’ interesting is how it both recognizes the individual while simultaneously allowing them to disappear into the whole again. In culture, there is both identity and anonymity. There is a constant self–>group transaction that is based on both affection (inward expression) and image (outward expression). This transaction is then repeated across cultures, with completely different functions. Differences within and across cultures are differences nonetheless, but the individual can think while groups simply gather.

So this is a brutally narrow take on how people gather and cohort and manifest their vision of what it means to be human, but the point remains: As educators, we suffer that same reductionism when we see the masses the same way Nielsen does television ratings. Students aren’t demographics, and it’s murky at best to see how treating them that way has improved their lot or our shared progress.

While squinting and trying to narrow gaps, it’s too easy to lose the scale and product of our work. The segmenting of Mackenzie and Andrew into a group, and that group into a subgroup, and their understanding into data, and the knowledge we hope they come away with into standards we can teach with—this all becomes a tone—a posture dictates the terms of teaching and learning. Equity in the classroom is different than in the job market.

A subcorollary is that we all share equity and inequity, both in possession and effect. In “The Hidden Wound,” Wendell Berry writes, “It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other…. we are one body, and the division between us is the disease of one body, not of two.” This is both abstract and practical. We share both living space and social membership.

Somehow, though, public education, more so than any other industry or profession, is expected to aggregate these inherent disparities while transcending them. Our task?
- Create a curriculum that provides a common language for knowledge without homogenizing the nuance of that knowledge
- Design learning models that are inherently inclusive regardless of access to technology
- Establish authentic functions for family members and communities who may speak a completely different language
As individuals, we work to separate ourselves—as children, often based on image, and as adults, often based on income, where we choose to live, what we drive, the smartphone we carry, and what we choose to do “for a living.” But each of these expressions of who we are–gender, native language, race, sexuality, socioeconomic level, and so many others–are also opportunities for disparity all work to undermine the function of education.

It’s easy to see equity in education as a matter of fairness, access, and inclusion, but that’s only the case if what’s being fairly accessed is a system of teaching and learning that is able to meet the needs of an increasingly global population—that means fluid, responsive, dynamic, neutral, and alive. For an industry that struggles to get every student reading on grade level, this may be a bit much. My gut reaction, then, is that this can only occur through the affectionate expression of the local—this student in this home in this community, with the school functioning as an extraordinary support system.

The equity is at the student level rather than the demographic level because demographics only exist in paperwork. For every student, there is commonness and there is difference; there is what’s shared (i.e., student needing knowledge), and there is distinction (e.g., poor, rural, white, black, male, female). This never stops. We can revise our schools, curriculum, pedagogy, and technology until it is inclusive, fair, and accessible to every student, but that’s been an ongoing effort that may represent a kind of basement for our goals.

But why not consider something more ambitious? New thinking about the terms and definitions of gender emphasize both the characteristics and the fluidity of any culture. If we insist on standardizing content, maybe we can avoid standardizing education. How many different answers are there to, “Why learn?” Fantastic! Let’s iterate ourselves until we can honor that.

The work before us, then, may not be to level an academic playing field for which there is no straight, but rather to create new terms for why we learn, how, and where—and then change the expectation for what we do with what we know.

Simply guaranteeing access and inclusion into a body of content-based is no longer sufficient if our goals stretch beyond academic. A modern definition for equity in education may be less about equal, fair, or even, and more about personalization–a body of knowledge, habits, and networks that help each student realize their own perfectly unique potential.

As for a definition for equity in education? How about, “eye-level access to curriculum, education models, and learning spaces that depend entirely on the native interests, knowledge demands, and human affections of learners individually.”

Or more briefly, “a fully-realized system of learning that starts and ends with the humanity of each student.”

A New Definition For Equity In Education; adapted image attribution flickr user helpingting and skotit;
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Terrell Heick

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September 24, 2024