Sunday, December 14, 2008

Teaching.

Kahlil Gibran:
No man can reveal to you aught but that which lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
A reader alerted me to the following article by Chris Hedges: The Best And Brightest Have Led America Off A Cliff. It is an article about the failings of our American Universities to deal with multiple intelligences and diversity of class... that they have become so intent on preservation of deeply entrenched disciplines in denial of reasonable intellectual debate. Evidently we are a very long ways from Wisdom of our hands in schools. According to Hedges,
"These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority."
This morning, I was reminded of Gibran's quote. The real challenge in this blog is not to educate but merely to awaken from half sleep matters that lie within our own hands.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous6:33 PM

    I have to disagree, or maybe I'm just old enough and was fortunate enough to have had university professors who encouraged my questions. I don't know how "gifted and talented" I was, but I sure did ask awkward questions in school. And as far as I can tell, my sons have both adopted the same way of thinking.

    Mario

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