SOURCE: “Art of the Difficult,” in American Scholar, Vol. 61, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 312-15.

In the following review of Begin Here, Pritchard commends Barzun's pedagogic ideals and concurs with his negative critique of contemporary American education, though notes that Barzun's recommendations contain “an element of Old Codgerism.”

It is almost half a century since Jacques Barzun published his wise and witty Teacher in America (1945). I was, briefly, a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University when the book was republished eight years later (as one of the first paperback titles in Doubleday-Anchor's memorable venture), and although I had read some of what William James and John Dewey had to say about teaching, Mr. Barzun's book was the first I encountered that took on the subject in a wholly contemporary, wholly pertinent way. From time to time I sat in on Jacques Barzun's course in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history...