ABSTRACT
Given the unity of cognitive and expressive skills expounded in the last two chapters, how can we best encourage our students to apply these skills to the formidable mass of texts they will confront in any academic course? How can we stimulate the mind and the sensibility to become active in the face of often recalcitrant and abstruse material? Too frequently, enthusiasm and talent are stifled by the sheer volume of reading. In this chapter we suggested some exercises which will help students to assimilate that reading, while sharpening their critical powers. Where do they start? How do they continue? Above all, what is it they are to accomplish? Before the end of the rhetorical era such questions had very definite and detailed answers which could be taken for granted. There was a broad, unified curriculum within which philosophy, history and literature, and the ways in which they were studied, all had their allotted roles. Pupils who went through the mill of school and university covered a common sequence of graded exercises which provided them with an intellectual lingua franca. This is no longer the case. Instead, we have a vast and complex landscape of more or less distinct disciplinary fields, each with its own methpdologies.
