on education.
I was reading Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad for my humor class, and this excerpt resonated with me. It captures the problem when teaching doesn’t promote independent, critical thinking. (Which, if you ask me, defeats an important purpose of education in itself.)
What do you think? What is your opinion? No one ever asked. We all graduated from Wellesley able to describe everything we had studied — Baroque painting, Hindemith, Jacksonian democracy, Yeats — yet we were never asked what we thought of any of it. Do you like it? Do you think it is good? Do you know that even if it is good you do not have to like it? During reunion weekend, at the Saturday-night class supper, we were subjected to an hour of dane by a fourth-rate Boston theatre ensemble which specializes in eight-rate Grotowski crossed with the worst of Marat/Sade. Grunts. Moans. Jumping about imitating lambs. It was absolutely awful. The next day, a classmate with the improbable name of Muffy Kleinfeld asked me what I thought of it. “What did you think of it?” I replied. “Well,” she said, “I thought their movements were quite expressive and forceful, but I’m not exactly sure what they were trying to do dramatically.” But what did you think of it?
