“I have graded more than 500 undergraduate papers about why Plato is an idiot and no one would ever behave in the Republic the way he has the people behave in the Republic. I have graded maybe 15 brilliant undergraduate papers about why Plato thought people would behave that way in the Republic, and the differences between Plato’s worldview and Plato’s psychology and our own, and why he thinks this thing that to us seems wrong.
That to me is the much harder kind of critical thinking, the empathetic kind of critical thinking that doesn’t criticize but reads carefully, critically, prudently and with empathy and connection to try to understand the other side, which I think is something that doesn’t just apply to the academic world, doesn’t just apply to how we write a paper in a class. It applies to how we read a blog post, how we judge a New York Times article, how we evaluate when someone has posted something on Twitter that they want us to hate or like to hate, as Twitter often is, whether the empathetic reading, which is the really challenging critical element, is there.”
– Ada Palmer [x]
