To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.
George SteinerRead
An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Academic disciplines are shaped by social practices rather than just facts.
This quote by James Paul Gee emphasizes that academic disciplines are not merely a collection of facts and principles; they are dynamic constructs shaped by social interactions and practices over time. The way knowledge is generated, debated, and transformed is rooted in the unique social contexts and methods that characterize each discipline, including how we think, communicate, and perform within that domain.
Themes
EducationSocial PracticesKnowledgeLearningContent
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about interdisciplinary studies, you might use this quote to highlight the importance of social context in education.
Similar quotes
So many young decorators are trying to reinvent the wheel, and the results are sometimes very dubious. They're striving to do things that have never been done before. Quite often it is done without authority, without knowledge, and without a background in taste. They need to be educated about the past, and they need a richer vocabulary.
Albert HadleyRead
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. JamesRead
We need to understand that every time an elementary teacher captures the imagination of a child through the arts or music of language this nation gets a little stronger.
Richard RileyRead
The teacher can seldom afford to miss the questions: What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition? The student should consider the principal parts of the problem attentively, repeatedly, and from from various sides.
George PolyaRead
As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
Robert Green IngersollRead