Read this review by Adam Gopnik too early this morning.   While Gopnik is assessing a recent history of the Holocaust, his final paragraph on Voltaire and the reality of building new things struck me as all too relevant to my teaching career:

The Enlightenment philosophers who insisted that the world could be improved were right. Voltaire was one of them. The mistake was to think that, once improved, it couldn’t get worse again. Voltaire’s point was not that optimism about mankind’s fate is false. It was that, in the face of a Heaven known to be decidedly unbenevolent, it takes unrelenting, thankless, and mostly ill-rewarded work to cultivate happiness here on earth, no matter what color the soil.