Monday, August 02, 2021
Refusal to Talk Down to Pupils
Donald Russell, in Christopher Stray et al., edd., Rediscovering E.R. Dodds: Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 282:
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As well as reading all this, I had of course to attend his own class on Plotinus. Here we were all, except Dodds, in the dark. Yet, characteristically, he maintained the fiction that we were discussing things on equal terms. Good teachers, in his way of thinking, do not condescend. Indeed, to me one of the most admirable things about Dodds as a teacher is just this refusal to talk down to pupils, but always to take what they said seriously, as if put forward by an intellectual equal.
