Paul Lacey, the author of The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry, is Professor of English Literature, at Earlham College, where he has also served as Provost and Acting President and as Faculty Consultant on Teaching and Learning. From 1979-82 he was Consultant and Director of a program of Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowships, sponsored by Lilly Endowment, Inc., at a number of major American universities. In 1983 he edited Revitalizing Teaching Through Faculty Development (Jossey-Bass) and has published a number of articles on teaching, literary criticism and faculty development.

Lacey believes the Inward Teacher is a powerful metaphor for understanding the experience of leading and being led and thus the order of power Quakers should use in shaping their institutional lives. In this essay he focuses the metaphor on critical issues in education. "Perhaps in no tradition is this metaphor - God is a Teacher - more central than in Quakerism, where the very core of the liberating message is, in George Fox's words, that "Christ has come to teach his people himself." What especially characterizes the Quaker perception, however, is that He is to be found waiting in every human soul."

Follow Paul through a discussion of "The Teacher and the Lesson," "Minding and Answering," "The Inward Teacher and the Community of Faith," "Natural and Spiritual Learning," "Witnesses to the Voice," "Leading In and Drawing Out," "Welcoming the Inward Teacher," and "Returning to the Source." Paul leaves us with wonderful queries and intrepid insights: "How is the Inward Teacher known? In joy and health, but also in loneliness and alienation; in the deepest encounters with other people and in dialogue with great ideas and works; in love but also in emptiness; in hunger but also in plenitude; in solitude but also in community. Wherever we are is the starting-place for encountering the voice which can speak to our condition. We cannot compel the inner voice to speak, we can only try to practice openness and attention, and when we hear the voice we can only practice minding and answering."

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