Meet the teacher who got Kurt Andersen excited about books

Gary Sedlacek was a teacher for 42 years, and his first job out of college was teaching American literature to high school juniors in Omaha, Nebraska.

In 1970, one of his students at Westside High School was a 16-year-old Kurt Andersen, now host of PRI’s Studio 360. For Andersen, “Mr. Sedlacek” was one of the teachers who made high school seem like a worthwhile endeavor — in part because he treated his students like intellectual equals.

“He assigned us essays by Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and he didn't teach Emerson and Thoreau as if transcendentalism was something that would be over our heads,” Andersen says. “He was smart, and he kind of assumed we were smart, and held us to really high expectations, and did all that with a sense of humor.”

Sedlacek was just two years out of college when he taught Andersen’s class. He wore a jacket and tie every day — a uniform handed down from his fiancée’s businessman brother-in-law — and says that in reality, his teaching style drew on his own high school education.

“I read Plato's dialogues, I read Plato's Republic,” Sedlacek says. “I knew I was going to go to college and I thought, well, I'd better start preparing. And so I got a list of 100 books that students ought to read to go to college, and so I started just going through those books.”

When Sedlacek finished high school, he had football scholarships waiting for him at two different colleges. He declined them both.

“I chose not to take advantage of those scholarships because I thought when I went to college I was preparing for a profession,” Sedlacek says. “I didn't think I'd make it as a professional football player, and I wasn't sure I wanted to.”

Instead, he chose the academic route. And in Sedlacek’s American literature class, Andersen recalls learning not just about the books themselves, but the ethics, philosophy, and morality woven into each text. To Sedlacek, that was precisely the point.

“You have to carry everything to the level of personal values, or else there really isn't any value in reading literature,” Sedlacek says. “Because literature, in its finest sense, is a reflection of the culture in which it's written. And it leads at the same time. It sees what's coming down the road.”

This past winter, a now-retired Sedlacek finished the novel he began writing in 1996. Writing, he says, is something frustrated English teachers always want to get involved in. And novel-writing in particular is an exercise in personal growth – not so different, perhaps, from leading a high-school English classroom.

“It's so much fun to say at the beginning of a day, ‘Ok, this is what I'm going to get done in this chapter,’” Sedlacek says. “And by the third sentence or by the third bit of conversation, you have your characters running off into an entirely different part of the forest.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.