Jim, Gary, List
Great comments, responses, and remarks all round. One of the great disappointments in my somewhat oddball academic career has been the experience of `teachers' who treat their work and their students as a sort of occupational hazard. I have found that there is an enormous wellspring of willingness, both learn and to get on with the _work_ of learning, when both the `teacher' and the `learner' (not post-modernist scare-quotes, BTW) find an area of new study in common. My experience was with the whole logical exposition of welfare economics (mentioned in a thread a few months back), which, although it's been around for half a centrury or more, has indicated that findings like Kenneth Arrow's are more than just a formal curiosity.
To get the point, though: Peirce would understand, I believe, that it is the independence of the sunject-matter of what either the teacher or the learner may think about it, that makes learning a necessarily collective endeavour. When one faces a class that has been brought up to understand learning as mere means to an end (getting a job, getting a wife or husband, making a zillion Dollars, etc), then the teacher can only engage the students' interest in the subject-matter if the latter can demonstrably be shown to accomplish those kinds of ends. When Peirce decried the tendency for Universities to set themselves up as centres of teaching a research (_Reasoning and the Logic of Things_), he clearly saw that the distinction between teaching and learning had much to do with the nature of Truth: Truth is essntially the _task_ of bringing reality (of whatever grade) to light such that our reasoning about it can stand the test of becoming conduct. Unfortunately, much of the anticipated conduct that informs the contemporary university student has to with careers, marriage, wealth, and so on, and the `teacher' who can't make these wishes come true is doomed to find another career (or, as I have found to my dismay, a dyed-in-the-wool cynicism about learning in general).
Enough for now. At least the few students I was able to work with in a form of co-operative learning, all got distinctions for their dissertations!
Cheers
Arnold Shepperson
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