from Staff
I have written many times about Wendle Berry and the effect he had on me professionally and personally.
Preparing students for a good job
Wendel Berry and the loss of the university
The peace of the wild things by Wendel Berry
Surprisingly, there are more.
Below is an excerpt from two minds, an essay about what he published in 2003 in response to the attack by the World Trade Center. This is a very rough essay that explores the two different “minds” we have and the effects of using – or we don’t use – everyone.
I wrote more about this in The two minds of a teacherS
An excerpt from “Two Tsulas” is below. You can buy books from Berry at the Berry Center bookstoreS


“It is often offered nowadays that if we only get rid of religion and other remnants of our primitive past and are enlightened by scientific rationalism, we could come up with the new values and ethics needed to preserve the natural world.
This proposal is completely reasonable and completely doubtful. He suggests that we can empirically know and rationally understand everything that is included, which is exactly the assumption that our crimes signed first.
Obviously we need to use our intelligence. But how much intelligence do we have? And what kind of intelligence do we have this? And how does human intelligence work at best?
See also The two minds of a teacher
To try to answer these questions, I suppose for a while that there are two different types of human minds: the rational mind and another who, to want a better term, will call the cute mind. Now I will say and try to remind myself that these conditions will look allegorical, too tidy and too separate – although I have to say that their separation is not invented by me.
The rational mind, without being perfectly embodied, is the mind that we all have to try to have. The mind is that the most powerful and influential people think they have. Our schools exist mainly to train and disseminate and authorize the rational mind.
The rational mind is objective, analytical and empirical; It is invented only by considering facts; He pursues the truth through experimentation; It is uncertain by prejudice, resulting authority, religious faith or feeling. Its ideal products are the proven fact, the exact forecast and the “informed solution”.
It can be said, the official mind of science, industry and government.
The cute mind differs from the rational mind, not as unreasonable, but by refusing to limit knowledge or reality to the scope of reason or facts or experimentation, and by making the reason an employee of the things he considers as a precedent and higher. “
The Berry Center
You can find more information about BerryS According to their site, the Berry Center was “established in 2011, Berry Center is a non -profit organization dedicated to focusing, knowledge and convergence in the work on changing our destructive industrial agricultural system in a system and culture that uses nature as a standard.