Next semester, I will be participating in a new pilot project at my institution. I teach freshman writing; next semester I have the second part of the sequence, in which students learn research and writing. I've elected - partly out of a desire for a new experience and partly out of a belief that the project will actually help my students learn better - to participate in a project that will introduce our students to the process of accumulating a writing portfolio.
This is something I did as an undergraduate student myself, though I was older than my freshmen (I did this in an advanced English course on Victorian Poetry). However, recalling the process, I am a firm believer that this will be invaluable to them, not only in terms of their writing, but in terms of teaching them organizational and time-management skills - two things sorely lacking in many of today's incoming freshmen. I also did something similar in high school (despite having a horrible overall high school experience, the education I received was exceptional), and it is actually this model on which I would ideally like to base my own course (though there will be planning meetings that might change this idea).
We were assigned a poet (we did have some choice) and asked to do historical, biographical, and literary research into that poet's life, situation, and works. Then we had to do an analysis of their overall trend as a poet and a deep analysis of a single poem. We were assigned to do notecards, outlines, bibliographies, etc. While many things I did I have no intention of ever doing again as a part of the research process, I did learn a great deal about how I work and how to best organize my thoughts.
I want my students to learn about their own learning process as much as I did. Whether they learn about Shakespeare in the process, I think, is largely incidental. If, for instance, they are more interested in the history of witchcraft or in the development from theater to film, I'm more than happy to let them go down that road.
However, my primary concern here is that the whole educational system, from grade school through higher education, is headed in a disturbingly individual-oriented direction. This is not to say that the individual student should be ignored. However, what I do not want to see happen is the privileging of the self over the material. I want students to learn about their interests, not project themselves onto a subject.
What I want to see is a student finding a passion and discovering how he or she best documents and retains that information, what they can do with it, and what it teaches them about their world. What I do not want to see is a student assigning a largely arbitrary judgment to something based on their own narrow world-view. I want to draw their attention away from the one thing that has - for the most part - made up their entire understanding of the universe: themselves. I want them to see that there is more to the world than what they see of it.
I do not want to convert them to my politics or religious views. I do not want them to (necessarily) join a cause or save the world. I want them to see that the student next to them is as important as they are. To see that the world needs more voices than one.
I believe - firmly - that if we can see that there are more people in this world than ourselves, that we will begin to learn to respect one another. I do not think that this will solve world hunger or bring about world peace - as a species we are too greedy and too violent for that. But I do think that, in general, there is much about our lives and our relations with one another, yes, even on an international scale, that might be helped by basic respect for people as people. For the acknowledgment that the person next to us is no less of a person because of their race or gender or creed. Even - I must remind myself - if they are a complete idiot.
My own tolerance for stupidity (in which I hypocritically include intolerance) is low. I despise ignorance, particularly since there are so many opportunities to eliminate it. I hate willful ignorance, in which someone blatantly refuses to believe what stands before them, real and solid. And, ironically, it is this which I seek to obliterate, which I refuse to tolerate.
Hypocritical? Yes. But I like to think that one can eliminate (in theory) stupidity without eliminating people. After all, the most rational of fictional races wished one another well by saying "Live long, and prosper." Life and prosperity are the products not of blind faith and intolerance, but of enlightenment and acceptance.
Live long, and prosper.