Reply to comment

I was so struck, @ the end of our in-person conversation this past Thursday, by Bill's report on the challenges, in the field of education, to the concept of "transferability"--which trouble our presumptions that students can transfer something they've learned in one domain, or @ one scale, to another. Howard's supplied me w/ some recent reading on this topic, and I plan to learn more about this...

...but also wanted to share that, in the interim, in the process of preparing notes for my new course on the James family, I came across a quite-resonant passage. Taken from the May 9, 1891 entry in The Diary of Alice James, it describes how our learning a lot in one area always and provokingly remains in an "airtight compartment," having no effect on "the rest of self," not contributing either to general conversation or "the practical wisdom of life":

what more than anything else makes this estimable race seem so completely foreign, as if we could not have had, possibly, a common descent, is the microscopic subdivision of their knowledge. It is impossible to predicate that supremacy in one accomplishment will...raise to the simplest level of intelligence the whole man, for he carries his gift, which he so often has in great perfection, in an airtight compartment through the walls of which radiates no germinating ardour, and he leaves the rest of himself with a touching, childlike candour, just as Nature made him....the established law, that a child's mind should be dedicated to and perfected in some one study alone...whilst all other fields are left fallow to the seed of accident. This is why things end so short off when you are talking. You ask some question cousin germane to the subject, when all the machinery stops....it discourages and interrupts the social flow to a greater degree than the hit-or-miss flutter and flap we give to the wings of imagination when we feel under foot the distressful ooze of doubt...whilst the quivering Yankee catches up, in the ravelled edges of his culture, simply an approximate knowledge of many things. You are so impressed, at first, when you come by the rounded smoothness of intellectual interchange, and are amazed until...you see that you can make no call of any sort upon the individual for a movement of inspiration....an excresence of one order of knowledge rarely dissolves itself into the practical wisdom of life.