Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Quotable Teacher, installment 2

This one's from Peter Markie, A Professor's Duties (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), p. 147:
It is frequently said that ethics cannot be taught. Upon examination this assertion usually means that moral values cannot be forced down a student's throat, that no coercive tactics seem to work. The assertion usually masks an explicit effort to "teach" some specific moral value to a student — an effort that invariably fails. I generally take encouragement from such accounts because they tend to confirm that students are not mindless and demand to be taken seriously.

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