“A little more than half way through Plato’s Republic, Socrates says something that’s bold, honest, and dispiriting enough to send even the heartiest of high school teachers on a two-day bender: “Compulsory intellectual work never remains in the mind.”
He means exactly what you think he means. You can’t force someone to learn anything they don’t want to learn—or you can force them to “learn” it for a test, but you can’t force them to remember it for more than a few minutes after classes let out for the summer. Any lesson which is forced on students won’t stick. You can’t force someone to remember the moral lessons of Pride & Prejudice, or the metaphysics of Anselm’s Proslogium, or the acrobatic hermeneutics of Gregory of Nyssa. You can deliver a heartbreakingly beautiful lecture on Till We Have Faces, but if your students are only listening because they have to, they will forget everything you’ve said in a few days.
You know Socrates is right.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. 