Some Education Colleagues

Duringmy first fewyears at the School of Education, I made the acquaintance of many unusual personalities, of whom Rulon was one. I want to sketch some of these in what follows. Robert Ulich I have already briefly mentioned. Hewas the senior philosopher inwhose area Iwas hired to teach. I have already described him as a classical humanist who had come to Harvard from Germany at President Conant’s invitation. His work was historical and comparative in spirit and he was dedicated to promoting a vision of democratic education that was more classical in outline than was Dewey’s, although he was not by any means a staunch opponent of Dewey’s. His background and mine were quite different. My philosophical training had been primarily analytical and centered on logic and epistemology rather than history, and my sympathies were with Dewey’s pragmatism. He was pleased, when I was hired, to learn that I had had a strong Jewish education, having studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary, for it gave me entry into a classical religious tradition. His own tradition was Christian but he had an extremely broad conception of religion, being drawn, among other things, to Asian thought, and developing a course in the history of religious education, which he taught for some years at the Harvard Divinity School.