Prof. Hart on Rosenstock

I was reading through the preface of Prof. Hart’s Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe (published in 2001) when I came across this on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. This seems to corroborate the speculation that Rosenstock’s maxim about the Citizen was often repeated in class.

[Rosenstock] had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind.

He would say, “History must be told.” He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.