INTERVIEWER: Tell me something about your education.
SUSAN SONTAG: All in public schools, quite a number of them, each one more lowering than the one before. But I was lucky to have started school before the era of the child psychologists. Since I could read and write, I was immediately put into the third grade, and later I was skipped another semester, so I was graduated from high school—North Hollywood High School—when I was still fifteen. After that, I had a splendid education at Berkeley, then at the so-called Hutchins College of the University of Chicago, and then as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford. I was a student for most of the 1950s and I never had a teacher from whom I didn’t learn. But at Chicago, the most important of my universities, there were not just teachers I admired but three to whose influence I gratefully submitted: Kenneth Burke, Richard McKeon, and Leo Strauss.
"I never had a teacher from whom I didn’t learn"
ResponderEliminarChica lista.
Exacto, las chicas listas son las que aprenden incluso de quienes nada pueden enseñarle. De los alumnos inteligentes que he tenido siempre me ha parecido que aprendían a pesar de mí, pero no a mi pesar. No me extraña que incluya a Leo Strauss, lo sorprendente sería que, habiendo sido alumna suyo, no lo hiciera. ¿Qué le enseñó? Algo elemental: aprender a leer sin prejuicios y con rigor y espíritu crítico. ¿Qué más se puede pedir?
ResponderEliminar¡Oh, alguien que está agradecida a sus maestros! Esto ya no pasa. Ahora, como la moda es decir que acompañamos a los alumnos y ellos aprenden solitos, hay poco que agradecer. Yo también aprendí de mis maestros y, como soy maestra, espero que mis alumnos puedan decir lo mismo.
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