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Teaching for Intellectual Humility
Book chapter

Teaching for Intellectual Humility

Tim Gorichanaz
Inglorious Pedagogy: Difficult, Unpopular, and Uncommon Topics in Library and Information Science Education, pp 89-104
01 Jan 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881813567.ch-5

Abstract

Education
“Education is what remains after you’ve forgotten everything you learned in school.” This is one of those quotes that’s attributed to any number of figures— in this case, Albert Einstein, B. F. Skinner, and an unnamed 1907 college president, among others. We may never know who said it first, but that hardly matters. This sort of wisdom is, like myth, unowned and for all of us. A truth that has haunted me since I began teaching is that when push comes to shove, I can remember very little of what I must have learned in college. When I talk to my own students, they say much the same thing about previous classes they have taken—in some cases only months prior. If education were about filling our students with facts, then this would not bode well. But I no longer think that is what education is about. The word’s etymology may be instructive here. Our “education” comes from the Latin “educare,” which means “to lead out.” This brings to mind the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, which suggests that teaching is about leading students out of the realm of shadows, bringing them closer to the light (Plato, 380 B.C.E./1992, 514a–520a). So rather than filling our students like buckets with facts, education is about moving them, bringing them somewhere new. In this chapter, I will discuss one direction in which we might move our students: toward developing intellectual humility, which is one facet of intellectual character.

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