Eric Hoffer made a living as a longshoreman, an author, and an adjunct professor. He is probably best known for The True Believer and The Ordeal of Change. It was a different world, where a laborer with a library card could prepare himself for a job teaching college. One of his comments that seems particularly relevant today is
We keep seeing great causes turning out to be rackets – Hoffer was correct and prescient. This next quote, from The True Believer, seems more current in today’s political environment than when it was published in 1951:
He wrote about education, describing what happened in our colleges – something that became increasingly visible after his death in 1982.
In my lifetime, I found new tools to use – I recall using Visicalc – one of the first spreadsheets, and advertised for its business applications – to calculate cuts and fills for land leveling projects. Basically the spreadsheet led me to learning to program by first showing me the chained calculations a computer could do for me. Hoffer described it thusly:
This seemed such an obvious thing – after I read it. A simple sentence that described the difference between the learned and the learners. A sentence that needed to be shared with most of my students.
Sam has pressed me for book reviews. Somehow, I feel that by sharing a few of Eric Hoffer’s observations, I may write something that encourages someone to read the books he wrote.
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