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I keep thinking about this passage, which keeps unsettling my sense of what I’m doing as a philosophy teacher. Like: what modes of teaching might also teach students that their own thinking is “unimportant and unauthorized”?
This is from Klinkenborg’s “Several short sentences about writing”. Here’s another typically insightful, brutal passage.
Thanks to @DoctorSpurt for getting me into this. Also: I thought I was beyond the point where a “writing manual” could affect me, but this thing razored into my awareness of what exactly I was doing in the small moments of my own writing.
The real question is: what will happen when I assign it to my undergrads?
Like: I think I’ve always striven to encourage a sense of intellectual self-trust, but I also think the methods of teaching “rigor” that absorbed as a student often contain an inculcation of profound self-distrust, and I wonder how much of that is still floating around in me?
