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In my last post, I wrote about my difficulties with reading academic criticism. In this post, I’ll talk about the other main component of my program: the classes.
Ostensibly, my classes were seminars rather than lectures. However, each class usually had some kind of a lecture component, which varied in length depending on the style of the professor. This lecture would then be followed by a class discussion, which again took various forms depending on the style of the professor.
If the professor gave longer lectures and was fairly vocal about their own opinions, then the class discussion usually took the form of a few students excitedly echoing the lecture and agreeing with the professor, while the rest of the students kept their confusion or disagreement to themselves. Occasionally, someone might voice a differing opinion. The other students would usually then argue the professor’s opinion until the first student gave in. Occasionally, I would attempt to put into practice what I had learned at St. John’s, by asking a question, not necessarily because I didn’t understand something, but because I thought that question could help us get to the heart of an issue. For example, if the professor had lectured on faith, and asserted that faith could do x, y, and z, then I would ask what exactly we mean when we use the word faith. However, these questions were usually quickly answered by the professor in a few sentences (“My definition of faith is…”), and the rest of the class would then continue with whatever they had been saying before.
On the other hand, if the professor was less vocal about their own opinions and devoted more class time to discussion rather than lecture, the ensuing discussions still did not live up to the kind of discussions that I had experienced at St. John’s. I soon learned that at St. Andrews, class discussions were more like debates than I was used to. One group of students of students would take up one opinion, another group would take up another opinion, and both would spend the class advancing arguments in favor of their own position and against their opponents’. I missed the St. John’s style of conversation, in which the participants had not determined their opinions from the outset, but used the conversation as a collaborative means of thinking through various opinions – where the participants were not opponents trying to win a debate, but partners trying to search out a difficult road.
A big part of the problem, as far as I could tell, was an inability to sit with uncertainty and confusion. I suddenly realized how unusual it was, that at St. John’s I had heard a tutor say “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand this reading,” and mean it, at least once a week. Our tutors taught by example the first principle of wisdom, that the wisest man is the man who knows that he knows nothing. And Johnnies learned from them that the best class is the one that you leave more confused than you went in – because confusion, in its best sense, is an ability to question and disagree with even yourself, so that when you do finally settle on an opinion, you will do so because it has the ring of truth about it, not because it is your own. But none of this was much present in my classes at St. Andrews, where the students had their predetermined opinions either confirmed or overruled by the professor’s opinion, and where the example set by the professors was one of intelligence and knowledgeability, not one of humble wisdom.