What if your mind is hungry, but not particularly literate? "Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance," Isaac Watts advised his readers, in his self-education treatise Improvement of the Mind (originally published in 1741). "Impress your mind with a deep and painful sense of the low and imperfect degrees of your present knowledge." This cheerful admonition was intended as a reassurance, not a condemnation: A well-trained mind is the result of application, not inborn genius. Deep thinkers, Watts assures us, are not those born with "bright genius, a ready wit, and good parts" (a relief for most of us). No matter how ignorance and "low" a mind might be, "studious thought . . . the exercise of your own reason and judgment upon all you read . . . gives good sense . . . and affords you understanding in the truest improvement." -from The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 20:29:45 +0000
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