Why don't we just read a whole book for the whole semester.

Every great text is great because of *how* it discusses what it discusses, rather than just what it has to say. That is why I'm getting more and more worried about formal education that consists mostly in training students to memorize 'summarized' versions of texts (of sociologists, philosophers, novelists, etc). I'm not against memorization per se. One needs to have a certain amount of knowledge in a given field before she can build her own, personalized and critical knowledge on top of it.

What I'm concerned with is that almost everything taught in school is based on one and the same foundation, when it comes to what people often call the "philosophy" of education. More precisely, the epistemological and ontological foundation of what is taught in school. Or even more precisely, the fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ONE AND THE SAME EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL GROUND for everything taught in school, or various texts and discourses in general.

A great text builds its own ground. It deliberately defies the given, the conceptional and linguistic convention that implicitly encourages certain ways of linking ideas and words. It is a vigorous and often painstaking movement that tries to furrow its own channel (or canal, if you prefer to think the flow as that of fluids) through which the old language flows and is defined anew. Great texts contest over the rules of language themselves, rather than produce another combination of the given materials.

So, basically, I would like to see teachers teaching ONE book for the whole semester. Well, that might be too extreme. Okay. Maybe a couple of books. Or even some short passages. Quantity itself doesn't matter. Let them struggle with them. Let them read one damn passage over and over again, until they finally *kind of feel* that something is being written, being produced, from the level they usually just take for granted. Why should we even care if our children all go through the same textbooks (not literally the same books, but assortments of similar pieces of knowledge)? We all know that they won't even remember most of them.

(And same goes to undergraduate and graduate curricula. I really think we are told to read too much, and not to really immerse ourselves in the text. One.good.text.)