Jonathan Jacobs, a philosophy professor at John Jay College in New York City, wants his students to think in paragraphs. He is profiled at The Christian Science Monitor.
A taste:
...he pushes first-year students in his classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice “to go from the blurt, to the sentence, to the paragraph, so that by the time they graduate they are thinking in paragraphs,” he says.
That’s a lesson we could all learn from, he says. So much of political discourse happens in oversimplified slogans and labels. “That unfortunately makes it very easy to turn disagreements into hostility and hostility into distrust and distrust into an unwillingness to compromise,” Professor Jacobs says.
That kind of thinking has produced a society where people see each other as villains and victims, he says. But when we allow ourselves to engage in nuanced discussions – to think and talk in paragraphs – common ground emerges.
One root of the problem, he says, is a shift away from a collective understanding of civics. Rather than focusing on the shared values that underpin our institutions and societal norms, we have become caught in a zero-sum game of politics.
Read the entire piece here.
