#355. Honesty

#355.

Honesty begins in the classroom.

Unfortunately, I believe that honesty is the last thing you learn in the classroom.  I'm talking here about intellectual honesty, the stuff that's not measured by how well you do on a test, or how well you can remember specific points in a book that you are then directed to write about.  Intellectual honesty leads to critical thinking ability.  And I'm not sure how much of that we've got going on.

You can read any random movie review, and from an objective standout notice almost immediately that the thing the movie critic is reacting against is almost never the movie itself, but whatever the critic had been thinking about, irregardless of the experience they actually had watching the movie.  It's because they're reacting to elements that don't necessarily combine to the movie experience.  They harp on general observations, but cannot for the life of them tell you what a movie is actually worth.  Critical consensus has no business being so different from the typical audience reaction.

The same goes for how people read, how people write, and the disparity of good literature and good writers being shunned in favor of the easy fix, like reading is a drug.  I'm not sure that critical thinking is taken into account in this equation.  If it makes you think, then it had better have a lot of whiz bang elements, too, but it can't make you think too much!  I don't know.  That's just some of what I've been thinking...