Refreshing Self-Reliance

• Published in: Nano (New York, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2016-12 (10), p.1
• Main Author: Hamilton, Samuel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dialectics; Digital humanities; Education; Essays; originality; Parenting; Pedagogy; quotations; Samuel Hamilton; Self Reliance; Self study; Students; Writing
• ISSN: 2160-0104; 2160-0104

[...]similar to how this student’s essay described it, all of these students’ analyses of “ Self-Reliance ” unsettled much of what we thought we knew and what we learned about Writing Education and Miseducation. Just as we thought we had a foothold on one layer/context, another appeared, and as our understanding of additional layers stabilized, our understanding of the previously settled layers was disrupted. [...]when my students and I read one another’s essays, we noticed how many of us had selected different aphorisms and used them in different ways to make sense of vastly different meanings of “ Self-Reliance .” Self-culture existed and functioned as a sort of grab-bag of pedagogical methodology in and throughout 19th century. Because advocates for self-culture borrowed freely and inconsistently from religious and secular sources, natural and human sciences, established (at the time) pedagogical theories and wholly original insights, a singular functional existence of “self-culture,” either in theory or in practice, is impossible to identify. How can self-culture be both a deeply independent and individualized personal project as well as a widely promoted and collectively supported national project? [...]must someone learn from someone else that they should teach themselves, let alone how they should go about teaching themselves?