I remember starting my career as a university professor with an eye to two futures, one I badly wanted to help become reality, the other one I wanted badly to prevent. Things started off rather badly and did not end so well. Resistance to the progressive notions I had learned from true progressive educators were not readily accepted because they meant that ways of teaching that earned so many merit were likely not good ways. Teachers should not act as fountains of wisdom, the new paradigm argued, because they were really no wiser than their students because the knowledge they held was possibly, even likely, to be flawed, this no fault as long as students were taught how to and had the opportunity to assess the value of that knowledge. My wisdom, too often, before it was tested, was rejected, this, too often, not because sound analysis found it to be wrong but because just to think about it caused discomfort.
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