Saturday, September 25, 2010

Intellectual insecurity

"In short, the painful truth we voracious students discover, at twenty, or forty, or sixty, is that what we sometimes call the 'knowledge of explosion' has left us all ignorant of vast fields of knowledge that every educated man and woman ought to have mastered. Is it any wonder that we tend to be defensive in debate, sure that our next class or public lecture will reveal the fatal truth: We are ignoramuses, and since we call ourselves professors, scholars, even doctors, we risk exposure as frauds?"

--Wayne C. Booth, "The Idea of a University--as Seen by a Rhetorician"

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