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One of the nicer things to happen to me this past week was have @phil_christman review Why They Can't Write. His intro about his own journey as a writer is great fun all by itself. plough.com/en/topics/comm…
@phil_christman I've been writing "seriously" for let's say 25 years now (dating to the start of grad school), and I still struggle with the questions of identity that attach to thinking of oneself as a writer. Phil's examination of his own origins illustrate how fitful these things can be.
@phil_christman He illustrates something that I think is generally true about writers and writing, that writing is a continual process of discovery, perhaps self-discovery most importantly. Who am I? and What do I have to say? are ?'s that'll follow a writer for their entire lives.
@phil_christman One of the unfortunate parts about an education system oriented around proficiency and standardization as proxies for future productive work in a capitalist economy is its failure to give students access to those questions of identity and agency.
@phil_christman Had an interesting dinner with a group of folks last night heavily weighted towards the medical profession and they expressed concerns about a perceived lack of "curiosity," in younger medical professionals. I argued that if this is true, it's not generational or character defect
@phil_christman I believe it's the consequence of a culture of schooling that values "performance" and "achievement" over exploration and curiosity. Young medical students are likely to have excelled at fulfilling the markers of achievement. Curiosity is not something useful in those spaces.
@phil_christman What good is curiosity as a way to excel on the MCAT or get a 4.0? Curiosity is a distraction from those goals, not an aid. If med schools want more curious students they need to change their criteria and incentives for admission to the arena.
@phil_christman You can't say we want curious people and then use criteria that punishes curiosity. So much of what's ailing education up and down the ladder is a failure to examine the underlying values attached to particular policy approaches.
@phil_christman As I say in Why They Can't Write, current methods of teaching writing are simultaneously too punishing and not nearly challenging enough. "Error," as narrowly defined, is harshly punished as students are driven towards surface-level "proficiency..."
@phil_christman On the other hand, the challenge of being curious, of building a base of knowledge of one's own, of grappling with the ideas of others in a meaningful way are often absent from writing instruction, and even education in general.
Why would we expect med students to arrive being ready to be curious after curiosity has been explicitly stamped out of their educations?
