ABSTRACT
Teaching («te¤chi˜) One of the first things a college teacher learns is that there is an astonishing level of collective wisdom and knowledge in a class of thirty students. It may not often be factual knowledge, or at least not factual knowledge about a wide range of historical topics, since that is not what our culture values much, but it is judgment and insight of a high order. There are always some individual students of exceptional intelligence, people whose stunningly original perceptions illuminate and haunt you and the class for years thereafter. In the midst of a discussion that mostly plays out the perspectives you have learned to anticipate from years of study, suddenly a student offers a fresh analysis that startles and transforms both your understanding and everyone else’s. But another kind of knowledge exists that is reassuring and fulfilling in a different way: namely, the collective analysis a class is capable of offering. For these and other reasons, we might note, electronic learning can never fully substitute for the learning community a classroom creates.
