In defending the relevance of a face-to-face, desks-in-a-circle classroom experience for humanities students, the author reminds us that the most fundamental element of a real humanities education (and perhaps any deeply educational experience) is “the power to doubt and then to reimagine.”
He gives a wonderful example of a student coming the brink of one of these epiphanies.
Now she looked at me, and didn't need her notes. We had read the Heidegger essay months ago. She'd been working to articulate this all semester: "I mean, when we say what something is, we kill its other chances. I think we do that to people, too." This idea changed things for her, complicated her relationship to others and to herself.and later...
These moments—one of collapse and one of clarity—represent what is, for me, the heart of the humanities classroom. They are difficult to characterize and impossible to quantify. They are not examples of student success, conventionally defined. They are not achievements. I want to call them moments of classroom grace (my italics). There is difficulty, discomfort, even fear in such moments, which involve confrontations with what we thought we knew, like why people have mortgages and what "things" are. These moments do not reflect a linear progress from ignorance to knowledge; instead they describe a step away from a complacent knowing into a new world in which, at least at first, everything is cloudy, nothing is quite clear.
To say that women's studies, or philosophy, or French (or discovering in the library) is a waste of time for students who need more-practical training is to tell those students we already know who and what they are. It is to kill their other chances.
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