IP

Thinking well means thinking slowly, patiently, and humbly. Above all, as Jacobs points out, it amounts to a proper “orientation of the will” (emphasis in original). This is advice our age desperately needs to hear—as my own experience in the classroom attests.

I have spent the past ten years teaching English literature to high schoolers, a period which has coincided almost exactly with the proliferation of the smartphone. My students are eager to learn and a joy to teach, but through no fault of their own they have been raised on the intellectual equivalent of a soda-and-candy diet. When it comes to literature, they expect the instant answers found in online guides like SparkNotes, not the difficult work of arguing for a certain interpretation of Hamlet. In class discussion their first instinct is to recoil from uncertainty. They are habituated to searching in the frictionless cloud, not in the dark woods of the self. More than anything, they need to heed Jacobs’s advice to “practice patience and master fear.” 

MIKE ST. THOMAS, To Think or Not to Think?