My role as a teacher is to bring those texts to the students
and hope that they snag something in their minds so that the
information flow slows or even comes to a momentary stop. If I
can draw students into the literary world of 400 to 500 years
ago -- even briefly -- their present can become richer and
more complex, if not more efficient. A student who has come to
grips with a text from another culture from many centuries ago
no longer perceives the present in quite the same way. The
awareness of the complexity of a difficult text from a foreign
culture leads to an awareness of the complexity that marks our
present culture. That makes for a less-efficient consumer of
facile marketing and political spin; but that inefficiency
makes for a richer individual and a more responsible citizen.
-- Michael Randall "A Guide to Good Teaching: Be Slow and
Inefficient" The Chronicle of Higher Education December 8, 2000
Often the texts that are most effective in slowing down the
flow of information are the most enigmatic: The prologues to
Rabelais's Gargantua or just about any essay by Montaigne
often bring students to a halt, since the meaning of those
works is not, and never will be, fully self-evident.
...
This sort of learning is perhaps even more valuable today,
when intellectual worth increasingly is understood in terms of
how much information one can process. We might do well to
remember that knowledge consists of more than information;
rather, it is the ability to understand and to appreciate the
difficult and complex products of the human imagination. That
type of knowledge is common to all of our subjects and is the
meat and potatoes of education. Teaching that supports that
kind of understanding is by nature slow and labor-intensive.
In a word, inefficient.
-- Michael Randall "A Guide to Good Teaching: Be Slow and
Inefficient" The Chronicle of Higher Education December 8, 2000