Written by Maria Fahey
When Phil Schwartz retired from teaching in 2014, I was asked to say a few words about him at our final faculty meeting. Phil already had been honored at various festivities, and I knew that he was tired of being praised. He was ready to be upstate tending his garden, sitting on his porch reading Homer or Herodotus, not listening to speeches about his importance to Friends Seminary, or education more generally.
I remember observing that Phil’s ambivalence about his own importance predated these retirement ceremonies. Indeed, it seems to have informed certain curious educational theories Phil had espoused over the years. For instance, when I was a young teacher at Friends, Phil often would proclaim: “Children do not learn because of us; they learn despite us. Our job is not to interfere with their learning.”
Of course, anyone who ever has been in Phil Schwartz’s classroom—or, for that matter, anywhere within a three-block radius of it—will have heard Phil not interfering with children’s learning, his booming voice informing some hapless eighth grader that showing up without homework “sucks the wooly big one” or his joyful ululation “Great Googamooga” celebrating another’s recognition of an accusative case ending.
Phil nonetheless insisted that he not be regarded as distinct among his colleagues. One year, he responded to a yearbook dedication by accepting the honor reluctantly, and only on behalf of all teachers. He explained that he was not a captain like Odysseus but rather a crew member like Elpenor, who wanted to be remembered for having swung his oar with his shipmates. I always wondered what those students thought about this analogy. As many of them knew from having studied The Odyssey, Elpenor climbed up onto the roof one hot evening when he was sodden with wine. When he awoke at dawn, he was still so dazed that he forgot to climb back down the ladder and instead plunged headfirst to his death.
Despite his protests, Phil Schwartz had an extraordinary and distinctive influence on his students and colleagues. When I first met Phil, I was twenty-something and teaching because I needed to pay the rent. I enjoyed the work but hadn’t yet decided what I was going to do with my life. Phil’s example made me realize that designing ways for teenagers to study literature and language is as interesting, rigorous, and fun as anything else I might do. And I know many other scholars and teachers who name Phil as an essential influence in their life’s work.
However outsized his presence, Phil did swing his oar with his mates, and he inspired and led us by doing so. He showed us that grammar and glamour are etymological relatives and that understanding the structure of language allows us to understand our most profound and beautiful human qualities. He showed us that attentive reading of great works from the past keeps us appropriately humble about the present. He taught us that the most likely way to honor the Quaker testimony of simplicity is to break down the steps of learning for students and that, in doing so, we would learn more deeply ourselves. He challenged us to think of military service as community service. He insisted that allowing students to experience the consequences of their mistakes is to allow them a most fundamental human freedom, namely the freedom to take responsibility for their actions. He showed us how community is built through diligent study in the classroom and deep silence in the meetinghouse. He taught us that our privilege as teachers is that our opportunities for learning, and thus our opportunities for delight, are without limit.
When Odysseus journeys to the underworld, he encounters the ghost of the great warrior Achilles who died young in battle and was honored with the most lavish funeral. Odysseus tells Achilles’s ghost that there is not a man in the world more blessed than he and that the Argives honor him as a god. The ghost-Achilles rejects Odysseus’s praise: he explains that he would rather be alive, a dirt-poor tenant farmer who slaves for another man on earth, than to be dead, a hero whose ghost rules over all the breathless dead.
Phil knew while alive what the hero Achilles only understood once dead. Phil chose to be a teacher of teenagers: he chose the mundane and unprofitable work of tilling young minds, season after season, with unwavering and fierce commitment. Achilles’s ghost yearned for the quotidian life of a farmer, but Phil lived that life as a teacher. Phil Schwartz—who started out a Military Policeman and ended up a Latin teacher in a Quaker school—taught so many of us that the modest fruits produced with the ploughshares and pruning hooks of teaching are more fulfilling than all the swords and spears of fame.
It is nearly impossible to imagine the world without the living presence of Phil. But buoyed up by all the years he rowed with us, I shall welcome new mates and continue to swing my oar. I trust that Phil, like Athena, will be sitting at the stern beside me, steering the way.
Phil Schwartz passed away on November 30, 2023. He taught at Friends for 48 years. (1966-2014)