Did You Learn Anything From This Sentence?

Here’s a presentation on study that I made last weekend at the Association for Moral Education national conference in Pasadena, CA.  It had a rather long title:  “An Architecture of Study, The Central Virtue of Formal Schooling, Placed in Dialogic Relation with Works of Conceptual Art And Quotations from Conceptual Artists: Then There Is the Idea, Which Is Always Unstated.”

I’ve reduced the title to its central question.

For those interested in this type of  thing, here is the abstract.  (The visual learner crowd can just watch the video.)

“Did you learn anything from this sentence?” Through engagement with this question, the film demonstrates that learning requires attention, dialogue (or dialogic reflection), and interpretation. Each of these is further examined. Works of conceptual art and quotations from artists and philosophers are interspersed without comment. We conclude that we learned from the original question because we took it seriously, reflected on it, and forged a personal understanding based on our appreciation and reflective practice. The components of attention, dialogue and interpretation are found to be ethical, not technical, so the legitimate aim of schooling is to inculcate intellectual virtue.