Here’s a great essay by Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at Virginia, on the high-speed students of the present.

They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they’ve ever known. And there’s something else, too, that distinguishes them: They live to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to.

But real education, and real wisdom, take longer to foment and ferment.  One of the teacher’s unquantifiable responsibilities is to slow these students down.  Edmundson explains how this might happen.

Not long ago a young man came to my office, plopped down, and looked at me with tired urgency. “Give me 10 minutes on Freud,” he said. “Convince me that he really has something important to tell me.” Despite appearances, this was a good moment. It was a chance to try to persuade him to slow it down. Get one of Freud’s books - Civilization and Its Discontents is usually the best place to start - read it once and again, then let’s talk.

In my experience as a student and a teacher, it takes this kind of overwhelming and impossible task - reading that kind of book twice - to slow a student down.  It’s so ridiculous that the student might just believe it, and might even do it.  Maybe in a decade, but still.  We are not slaves of time, we are beneficiaries of it.

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