I hope it isn’t a questionable position to say that in college we need to teach people not what to think, but how. Learning how to think, and acquiring a base of knowledge to think about, leaves the learner free to come to whatever conclusions.

I was thinking about this basic question today as I was trying to pull together a syllabus for next quarter’s course– an existing course called “Philosophical Perspectives” into which I get to slip a bit of my own favorites and favoritisms. There’s always too much stuff that I’d like to show the class. And I have to remind myself that if I give them too much stuff, the course becomes a survey of the “what,” a nickel tour of thumbnail sketches of condensed summaries of hasty opinions of preordained conclusions. Teaching fewer texts allow us to explore how each one of them is put together, how they dialogue with earlier texts and with the difficult-to-persuade reader, as well as how they deceive and dissemble. There’s a trade-off, then, between What and How, and I would rather have a smaller number of Whats and spend more time unraveling their Hows. The loss can be absorbed. I tell myself that if someone has watched one careful reading take place, and been affected by it, they may want to go home and do the same thing on their own. And that’s the point.