Week Two: Mill
PrintBy Lee Trepanier, January 23, 2012 in Pedagogy and Teaching
The second week concluded with a look at Mill’s defense of freedom of expression as a way for society to reach an understanding of truth. The students seem to grasp the fundamentals of the argument, but it is not clear whether they know how to analyze it in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, and underlying assumptions. My hope is that they will reach that point mid-semester. For the time being, I just want them to get use to reading primary texts and understand what the author is saying. Although this may seem more appropriate for high school, I have found it is not only necessary with the caliber of freshmen we receive but also a useful step for them to engage in analytical thinking and writing later in the semester.
Image credit: By Andreas Trepte (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
As an undergraduate I found that writing a precis of an article or passage was a tremendously beneficial exercise. One can't reproduce someone else's argument without careful reading and critical analysis. It's an especially good thing to do early in the semester, before students are well-enough acquainted with the course material to write much that's worth reading.