ESSAYS

KEEPING A RENDEZVOUS by John Berger (Pantheon: $21; 239 pp.) . Why be educated? To look down on people who aren’t? To get good jobs and make good money? This collection of essays, poems and stories by one of the world’s leading art critics confirms that there is, indeed, a better reason.

John Berger starts by looking at something--a painting by Velazquez or Jackson Pollock, a sculpture by Henry Moore, photos of villages in the French Alps, of liberated Eastern Europeans and of napalmed vehicles in the Persian Gulf--and tells us what he sees (far more than most of us can). Then he connects it to other things: history, politics, religion. The connections become a story--in a way, always the same story. The hero is the human mind making sense of itself and the world. This is the story we would be acting out, too, if we were as educated as Berger is. All set down in plain, unpretentious words.

Berger, whose previous books include “Ways of Seeing” and a trilogy of novels (“Pig Earth,” “Once in Europa” and “Lilac and Flag”), views the history of art as a long struggle between those who use art to maintain the status quo and those who use it as a means of subversion. He tells coal miners in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain that he would sympathize if they turned to violence, but adds: “It’s possible you may achieve what you are setting out to do in another way. . . . Often art has judged the judges. . . . I know too that the powerful fear art.”

Most of Berger’s essays, however, aren’t didactic in that sense. He’s interested in European peasants (including a 19th-Century French mailman who spent 33 years building an “ideal palace” out of stone) not because they are victims but because their qualities of mind--so conservative, yet able to cope with the constant uncertainties of crops and weather--have rarely been represented in art. In the end, he doesn’t seem to want to convince us so much as just educate us a little, so we can make connections of our own.