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Continuing
Series
Interviews with Exemplary Teachers:
Leon F. Litwack
Roy Rosenzweig
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
| EDITOR'S
NOTE: This continues a series of interviews in which distinguished
teachers share their strategies and techniques. Good teaching is
more often honored in rhetoric than reality. And great teachers
are generally known locally within their own schools, but less often
to a larger group of national colleagues. The goal in these interviews
is, in part, to identify and honor those people who have taught
with excellence, dedication, and distinction. But more than that,
we believe that these teachers have lessons to offer the rest of
us and that there are remarkably few forums for hearing their wisdom. |
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| These
interviews have been conducted by Roy Rosenzweig, director of the
Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.
They originated as part of the web site that CHNM and the American
Social History Project have organized for history teachers and students:
"History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web." Designed for
high school and college teachers of the United States history survey
courses (and supported by a grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation), this site serves
as a gateway to web resources and offers unique teaching materials,
first-person primary documents and threaded discussions on teaching
United States history. You are invited to visit it at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu.
If you would like to propose a teacher for inclusion in this series,
please e-mail Roy Rosenzweig at rrosenzw@gmu.edu. |
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Interview with Leon F. Litwack
|
| LEON
F. LITWACK is Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American
History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has
spent almost his entire career, earning a B.A. in 1951 and a Ph.D.
in 1958 and teaching since 1964. Litwack's many publications include
North of Slavery: The Free Negro in the Antebellum North
(1961), Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(winner in 1979 of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award),
and most recently Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age
of Jim Crow (1998). Litwack has received many honors in recognition
of his distinguished and path-breaking scholarship, including the
Pulitzer Prize in History, the Francis Parkman Prize, the American
Book Award, and election to the presidency of the Organization of
American Historians. Perhaps less well known is that Litwack has
also been an enormously popular and influential teacher, who has
received two Distinguished Teaching Awards and, as he notes in this
interview, has taught more than 30,000 Berkeley undergraduates. |
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What drew you to history
teaching?
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| My
interest in history began with the education imparted by my neighborhood
and my immigrant parents. I grew up in Santa Barbara, my father
worked as a gardener, my mother as a dressmaker, and we lived in
a rented house in a working-class neighborhood. Growing up in this
environment, I came to be fascinated by the story of how my parents
came to this country from Russia (and ultimately hitchhiked out
to California) and by the experiences of my neighbors, most of them
immigrants from Mexico. My neighborhood, then, exposed me to a diversity
of cultures, languages, and histories. I thought it to be a unique
and valuable education. But I found nothing about their experiences
in my courses in social studies and history. The history we were
taught in school was largely the history of Anglo-Saxons and Northern
Europeans. It was someone else's history, not my history, not my
life, not the lives of my parents, friends, and neighbors. If Mexicans
appeared at all in our textbook, it was as picturesque appendages
to a Europeanized mainstream. If African Americans were mentioned,
it was as docile and contented slaves; their history was said to
be a history of submission patiently and passively if not gladly
endured. The textbook we read in high school was no more enlightened
than the textbook used in most Ivy League colleges, in which Samuel
Eliot Morison of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia said
of slavery, "Sambo suffered less than any other class in the South.
Although brought here by force, the incurably optimistic negro soon
became attached to the country and devoted to his 'white folks.'" |
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| The
textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th
grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook's version
of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial
biases. (I had already read Howard Fast's Freedom Road.)
The research led me to the library--and to W.E.B. Du Bois's Black
Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: "An Essay Toward
a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to
Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880." Armed with that book,
I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook.
At the conclusion of my report, the teacher looked at the class
and said, "Now students, you must remember that Leon is bitterly
pro-labor." What did this have to do with my report? Only some years
later did I come to appreciate the thrust of her remark. My views
of labor, my outspoken support of unions, my political activism
had helped to shape--my teacher might have said prejudiced--my historical
vision. In my senior year, I edited the school newspaper, only to
find myself embroiled in a running conflict with the vice-principal,
who threatened to shut us down over editorials and stories he deemed
obscene or subversive. (We called for the removal of the Reader's
Digest from English classes, we opposed compulsory military
training and the ROTC, and we thought the funds used each year to
stage the Spanish Fiesta would be better spent on low-cost housing.)
That same year, the National Conference of Christians and Jews honored
our newspaper for its coverage of Brotherhood Week--a special issue
in which we focused on the persistence and virulence of racism in
American society. |
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| When
I came to Berkeley as an underclassman in 1948, political ferment
was extensive and diverse, and I was an eager participant. No doubt
(as my high school teacher had surmised) my political and social
commitments influenced the way I looked at history, but the study
of history in turn had deeply informed and shaped those commitments.
At Berkeley, history continued to exert its fascination on me. Not
one but several influences solidified my decision to teach and write
American history: my social activism (around such issues as loyalty
oaths, racism, and the Cold War), my trade union membership (The
Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, as I shipped out on freighters
during the summers and Christmas vacation, working as a messman),
and my growing awareness of the uses and abuses of the past, my
growing sense of the fundamental contradictions between my country's
often proclaimed ideals and its practices, between its professed
egalitarianism and deep inequalities in wealth and in conditions
of work and life. And clearly Black Americans, more acutely than
other Americans, had experienced these contradictions. (My senior
thesis examined another troubling historical fact: the exclusion
of Black workers from the trade union movement.) |
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| A
chance meeting in my junior year proved memorable. A friend (a graduate
student in history) called and asked me to come over to his house;
he said someone wanted to meet me. I was ushered into the living
room, and I recognized his guest immediately--it was W.E.B. Du Bois.
Of course I was deeply impressed; I had read his books. But why
had he singled me out? He wanted, he said, to meet an undergraduate
in history. He wanted to know what I was learning about slavery
and Reconstruction. My response was in two parts: the textbook (by
John D. Hicks) reflected familiar distortions and biases; the course
lectures did not, and their content impressed and astonished Du
Bois; they revealed new ways of thinking about both slavery and
Reconstruction. The person teaching the course was a young assistant
professor, Kenneth M. Stampp, who would have a profound impact on
my thinking and with whom I would ultimately write my dissertation
on free Blacks in the antebellum North. |
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When did you start teaching?
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| My
first position was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where
I taught from 1958 to 1964. I returned to Berkeley in 1964. As a
visitor, I have also taught at the University of South Carolina,
Louisiana State University, and the University of Mississippi, and
abroad at universities in Moscow, Beijing, Sydney, and Helsinki.
|
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What courses have you taught?
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| I
have always taught the survey American history course. In addition,
at Wisconsin I taught the Age of Jackson, and at Berkeley the history
of African-Americans and race relations. At both places, I also
taught undergraduate and graduate seminars. |
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Which are your favorite
courses to teach?
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| My
"favorite" course is the survey American history course. It is a
large course (some 700 students), and for most of the students perhaps
the only history course they will take in college. That is the challenge.
I have one chance at them, one opportunity to engage them in the
study of the past, to force them to see and to feel the past in
ways that may be genuinely disturbing, to develop in them an appreciation
of the inescapable complexity of human behavior and human relationships,
and to underscore how a study of the past may teach as many ironies
and ambiguities as it does clear lessons. |
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Could you say more about
the format of the course? My understanding is that you also have
sections and that you teach one of the sections yourself. Could
you talk about how the goals and experience of the sections differ
from the lectures?
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| The
course meets for fifty-minute lectures three times a week; in addition,
students meet in discussion sections for two hours a week, and some
four to five films are shown at night during the semester. The purpose
of the sections is to discuss the lectures and assigned readings
and to understand how they complement, reinforce, or contradict
each other. The section is not for purposes of regurgitating lectures
or books but to permit students to consider the implications of
the materials for understanding American society. Graduate students
meet the sections, and from time to time I have taught my own randomly
selected section. I also meet with the graduate assistants (there
are usually some 18-20 assistants for a course of about 750 students)
every week to discuss materials and teaching strategies. I try to
visit as many sections as possible, not to monitor or evaluate my
assistants but to give students an opportunity to discuss with me
as a group any questions they have about the course, including the
lectures and readings, and to see me under more informal conditions.
Of course I have office hours each week, as many as may be necessary
to meet with those who take advantage of the opportunity, and many
students come to office hours, sometimes in groups of two, three,
or four. |
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Your lectures are famous
among generations of Berkeley students. What are your favorites?
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| My
"favorite" lectures no doubt vary from year to year. If I had to
single out a few, I would probably cite "The Legacy of the Civil
War," "How Free is Free?" [the emancipation experience], "Hellhound
on My Trail" [The Age of Jim Crow], "American Rebels: The IWW,"
"Civilization of Discontents: Southern California in the 1920s and
1930s," "The Age of Violence: World War II," "The Civil Rights Revolution,"
"The Sixties," "Subversive Activities: Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and
the American Presidency," and the two multi-media presentations--"Nothing
to Fear: America and the Great Depression" and "To Look For America:
From Hiroshima to Woodstock." Those may be "favorites" but frankly
I look forward to every lecture, and the real "favorites" may be
those I have had sufficient time to revise significantly over the
previous year. |
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Some people, as you know,
are critical of large lectures. What would you say to them? Is
it possible to make personal connections with students in such
a large course?
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| As
an undergraduate at Berkeley, I enrolled in a number of large lecture
courses. I also had the opportunity to enroll in a number of small
classes and seminars. Although I enjoyed the small classes, I came
away from my undergraduate years realizing that several of the large
lecture courses in which I never even met the professor had the
most profound impact on me. (As an example, I would cite Kenneth
Stampp, with whom I took the survey course as well as upper division
lecture courses on the Old South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction).
Large lectures have never bothered me but I can't speak for all
my students. If you have a large lecture class, it is possible to
engage the students (at least most of them) but it requires careful
and systematic preparation. Each of my lectures has a beginning
and an end, and hopefully students will grasp the overriding theme
(if there is one). I don't know if it is possible to make "personal
connections" with 700 students but every class, in my mind, takes
on its own personality. I do not see the "audience" as an indistinguishable
blur but as individual students. I recognize and greet them out
of class (often to their surprise) and treat them as personably
as I can from the lecture podium. But I am at the same time a "formal"
lecturer. I use prepared notes, as I incorporate a considerable
number of quotations and original sources into my lectures. That
is simply my style, and I would never argue its superiority over
any other style. We have an outstanding teaching department at Berkeley,
and no doubt as many teaching styles as there are teachers. I realize
that suspicion has often been attached to the "popular" lecturer
(it can be a "kiss of death" in some departments), based on the
idea that popularity must mean a denigration of the subject or a
conscious effort to "entertain" students. I would argue that serious
materials can be communicated effectively in an engaging manner,
that history can be as dramatic, exciting, and important as the
materials we use, without in any way distorting or simplifying the
past. |
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That's a great phrase about
making students "feel the past in ways that may be genuinely disturbing."
What are some of the ways you do that? Does it backfire with some
students?
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| To
make students "feel the past in ways that may be genuinely disturbing"
is, in my estimation, simply to present the American past as something
less than an exercise in self-congratulation and nostalgia and a
collection of bland pieties. Intellectual inquiry, it has been said,
is of necessity a subversive activity, and intellectuals, writers,
poets, artists, musicians, and teachers are more likely than most
to disturb the peace and offend sensibilities. That is as it should
be. What we are trying to do in the classroom is to inculcate students
in the habit of critical thought, and that can be a dangerous addiction.
Does it backfire with some students? Of course. That is often the
moment we know we are achieving our objective. I don't want my students
to think the same way I think or to regurgitate my lectures in their
examinations. I want them to think, to consider the implications
of the materials, to understand that history does have consequences.
I do not want them to drown in facts and dates. I want them to feel
those facts, to consider the human consequences of the events, legislation,
policies, doctrines, and wars that comprise our history. History
is mostly about people and how they felt about what was happening
to them. To compel students to live within the past, to stand in
the shoes of those who came before us, to flesh out and give human
meaning to abstractions about democracy, freedom, liberty and opportunity,
to understand the past from the perspective of the men and women
who experienced it can be a disturbing experience--but ultimately
a rewarding experience. |
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| In
making students feel the past, I also want them to understand the
critical importance of history, that the way in which history is
written and taught does have consequences. The traditional view
of Reconstruction, for example, helped to shape race relations in
this country for nearly a century. The way in which the history
of that unique experiment in bi-racial democratic government came
to be inculcated into the minds of generations of Americans--in
the classroom, in textbooks, in literature and on the screen--shaped
white southern (and northern) responses to any challenge to segregation
or to any agitation designed to readmit Blacks as voters. History,
then, is more than the dead past. |
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What are the biggest themes
that you try to convey in the U.S. history survey course?
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| The
study of the American past is a complicated and demanding exercise.
It does not lend itself to easy explanations, to simple formulas,
themes, or lines on which to hang the historical phenomena we will
be observing during the semester. History is too ambiguous, too
elusive, sometimes unfathomable. History, it has been said, is the
study of the past in all its splendid messiness. I like the way
one of my colleagues, an eminent ancient historian, described his
lectures as designed not so much to deliver results as to recount
the agonies required to reach them. History usually defies measurement
and exactitude and a unifying theme or "organizing principle," and
hence it is difficult to define "the biggest themes" in my course.
I want to bring into the historical consciousness of my students
men and women ordinarily left outside the framework of the American
experience, mostly "ordinary" working class people who did not leave
behind the kinds of journals, records, and correspondence historians
rely upon but who nevertheless found ways to communicate their experiences
and ideas. I want my students to consider in a historical context
the idea that social inequities are neither inevitable nor accidental
but reflect the assumptions, beliefs, and policies of certain people
who command enormous power; that there are limits to our power as
a nation, that no country is exempt from history; that the indispensable
strength of America remains the right of dissent, and that few people
have cared more deeply about this nation than some of its severest
critics; and that we need to be wary of those who in the name of
protecting our freedoms would diminish them. History teaches, after
all, that it is not the rebels, the iconoclasts, the curious, the
dissidents who endanger a democratic society but rather the accepting,
the unthinking, the unquestioning, the docile, the obedient, the
silent, and the indifferent. |
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What have been the most
important influences on changing your lectures over the years?
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| Some of the above
"themes" remain constant in the course but the illustrations used
to teach those "themes" may be revised. Revisions rest in large
part on new scholarship and the opportunity to think about the most
effective ways to impart American history. I leave every lecture
my own most severe critic. The moment I find myself absolutely satisfied
with a lecture may be the moment I choose to leave this course.
Some have asked me from time to time, "Why do you spend so much
time revising your lectures? Your students, after all, have never
heard them." "Yes," I reply, "but I have." The lectures that change
the most are in those areas in which I conduct my research, as I
try out my new materials first on my students. Lectures are also
revised, as I have indicated above, in accordance with the new scholarship
(at least that part of the new scholarship that remains coherent
and readable) or a rereading or rethinking of the old scholarship.
And I do read carefully my course evaluations at the end of the
semester, as I have found my students often to be very perceptive
and suggestive critics; at the very least, I learn what works and
what does not work. I don't always follow their advice about readings
and even lectures, as sometimes it may not be a matter of what a
student prefers as what a student needs. |
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You note the important
ways that new scholarship has affected your lectures. Has your
teaching also been affected by the changing composition of the
student body or by the changing position of the United States
in the world?
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| In
my estimation, the new voices, the new experiences that have been
brought to the writing and teaching of history over the past thirty
years have transformed profoundly how we think about the past. To
overcome cultural illiteracy, we have managed to introduce into
our teaching sources experiences previously ignored or repressed
by restrictive and unimaginative scholarship--and unimaginative
scholars. That is an important change, no more so than the changing
composition of the classes I teach at Berkeley--a change dramatically
evident as I look out on that sea of faces in the survey course
each year. It is still not what it should be but much improved over
my student and early teaching years, when most Blacks and Latinos
appeared on college campuses only as cafeteria workers, janitors,
and fraternity and sorority cooks. When affirmative action came
to be expanded to include non-whites, it made a significant and
positive difference in the makeup of our faculty and students and
in the teaching experience. |
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What are the most effective
assignments that you use in the survey course?
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| I
believe it is the requirement that each student write an eight to
ten page research paper based exclusively on original sources. I
want them to explore the library (newspapers, government documents,
travel accounts, autobiography, oral histories), not the Internet
(I have limited them to four web sites, one of them the Library
of Congress). The topics need to be original, often seeking to answer
a specific historical question, and they need to be important and
challenging. Let me cite one example: What were the reactions in
the African-American community to the forced evacuation and incarceration
of Japanese Americans during World War II? Among the students most
affected by the research assignment have been those who found themselves
handling original manuscripts in the Bancroft Library. |
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What is your most memorable
or rewarding teaching experience?
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| Each
class is for me a memorable and rewarding experience, even when
it has not reached my expectations. Perhaps most memorable and rewarding
are the reactions of students expressed to me at the time (some
verbally, some written) or in many instances years or decades later.
I often think back to that day in Santa Barbara High School when
I sought to influence and hopefully change the way my classmates
and teacher thought about slavery and Reconstruction. Some fifty
years later, having taught more than 30,000 students at Berkeley,
I would like to think my teaching has made some difference in how
they conceptualize the past and assess its importance and consequences,
and that the materials to which they were exposed helped to deepen
their sensibilities and gave them a greater appreciation for the
relevance and complexity of our history. Teaching remains for me
that challenging, awesome opportunity to make a difference. |
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How do you think teaching
has changed over your career?
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| I
believe our teaching has changed most dramatically in respect to
the resources we employ to impart the past and the lives of the
peoples who made up American society. That has required us as teachers
to reassess the traditional ways we choose to document the past,
a sensitivity to the complexities and varieties of cultural documentation,
to the diverse ways in which people have conveyed their thoughts
and feelings about matters of daily and far reaching concern to
them. In his book Deep Blues, Robert Palmer asks, "How much
thought can be hidden in a few short lines of poetry? How much history
can be transmitted by pressure on a guitar string? The thought of
generations, the history of every human being who's ever felt the
blues come down like showers of rain." Music (from Joe Hill and
Robert Johnson to Bob Dylan and Tupac Shakur), films (for example,
Ethnic Notions and Birth of a Nation, Hearts and
Minds and Regret to Inform, The Life and Times of
Rosie the Riveter, Berkeley in the Sixties, and Freedom
On My Mind), and literature (for example, Richard Wright, Thomas
Bell, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston, Nathaniel
West) enable us to probe the inner lives of Americans in ways that
the traditional historical text or monograph or lecture cannot,
at least not with the same degree of feeling for the complexity,
range, and depth of the American experience. |
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What tips would you give
to a new history teacher?
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| I
would tell a new history teacher that when I taught my first class
I felt confident, eager, and enthusiastic. If anything, I may feel
less confident today but no less eager, no less enthusiastic. I
find it easier to teach than to talk or write about teaching. I
have no formulas to offer, no models, few new pedagogical strategies.
Whatever instructional techniques we may employ, the key to good
teaching remains the commitment, the spirit, the enthusiasm, the
passion, the sensitivity, and, yes, the doubts and skepticism, we
bring to the classroom. We need to be open to our students' queries
and ideas, and we often need to be patient listeners. No matter
what subject we teach, we need to be as concerned with our students'
written expression as with the quality of their oral participation.
We are all teachers of language, and helping a student to think
and write clearly is a responsibility all of us assume. That responsibility
takes on even greater importance when a proliferating jargon in
the academy threatens the very essence of communication--the ability
to be understood. |
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What, in your view, constitutes
good teaching?
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| Teaching
is more than imparting information. It is a process by which we
seek to stir and challenge the intellect, to shake it up. The best
teaching deepens sensibilities and develops insight and imagination,
often by asking the most uncomfortable questions. The amount of
information imparted in the classroom is less important than the
dialogue we begin with our students, in which we engage them in
that elusive pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead, in which,
as Mark Twain once suggested in defining education, we guide them
along "the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
The excitement in teaching comes from forcing our students to rethink
their assumptions, from making them discontented about what they
do not know, from working with them to test, even to undermine old
(and new) dogmas, creeds, and values. The excitement comes when
the teacher is able to bring about a shift of consciousness, a shift
that may not be immediately felt. That is why a teacher's impact
on the classroom defies any precise measurement or objective evaluation. |
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| The
life of the mind, imagination, and critical thinking remain the
key to our survival. The value of the teacher often rests on his
or her willingness to be a disturber of the peace, to afflict the
comfortable, the complacent, and the indifferent. In the classroom,
the beginning of wisdom for our students is when they are exposed
to alternate viewpoints, to the full range of possibilities in the
human experience, when they learn to be skeptical of delivered truths
and belief systems. And it is when our students come to appreciate
that Western civilization and Western culture and the Judeo-Christian
tradition are not the sum total of human wisdom. |
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