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Teaching Philosophy
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My teaching philosophy revolves
around the view that education's sole function today is to introduce
individuals to the process of learning and no more. We can no longer
claim, as in the sixteenth century, that in four years we can produce
an educated, cultured person, plus give this individual professional
training and vocational know-how. Life has become more complex.
Unfortunately, today's explosion of information is not equivalent
to the explosion of knowledge. So we are facing a major problem--how
to structure information into knowledge. Teaching, for me, has two
fundamental challenges: It has to provide the base of specialized
knowledge; and, more importantly, to provide connections between
these specialties and other disciplines. My courses aim not to train
students by giving them bare information for the mastery of a narrow
specialized goal, but to educate them in a set of guidelines that
they may use throughout their lives while becoming competent artists
and thinkers. My courses are courses of means, not ends.
Educational
challenge is to teach students like this one:
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