A Commonplace Book

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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
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